This summer, as the British Labour Party finds itself blindsided by the rise of Leftist populism, a number of analyses have sought to counterpose this against broader problems facing the Left across Europe. In power in many countries at the time of the 2008 crash, and having embraced free market economics and neoliberalism in many cases, social democratic parties have been left unable to articulate an alternative to traditional supporters enduring falling living standards, rising levels of job insecurity, and who – for the first time since 1945 – see an economic and political system which is palpably failing them.

In the absence of new ideas, the Left has increasingly taken refuge in old ones, generally defined in opposition to something: most notably, austerity. Paul Mason views this as the start of a long transition signalling the end of capitalism as we know it; the trouble is, as whatever will replace it is still entirely unclear, social democratic parties find themselves trapped defending a system which they know no longer works, amid a context of what was once organised labour being dispersed, atomised, by the rise of self-employment, the digital economy and globalisation.

In trouble across Europe – only in Italy, where the centre-right was humiliated by various euro-related disasters, are the social democrats still in a position of relative strength – the Left’s only (supposed) success story has been in South America: where it’s dominated over the last decade and more. But even there, its position is now dramatically weakening, for reasons which are depressingly familiar.

In any case, we should note that what might seem like ‘success stories’ to unreconstructed Leftists have amounted to little more than ugly, lowest common denominator populism in too many cases. The main driver behind the Left’s rise in South America has been powerful, emotive memories of the 1970s: when the US covertly supported a whole host of murderous, fascist dictatorships, particularly in the continent’s South Cone (encompassing Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay). As democracy returned, and those who grew up under these regimes came of age, populist, socialist movements grew in influence: most of which styled themselves in opposition to the imperialist meddling of Washington.

Yet when they came to power, the response of a number of leaders (particularly in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and to a lesser extent, Argentina) was to consciously divide their countries between rich and poor. To oppose the demagogue Hugo Chávez in Venezuela was to be depicted as part of some American-backed Fifth Column, trying to bring the horrors of the 1970s back; and while it’s true that the CIA have clearly tried to infiltrate the opposition at times, it’s more accurate to say that under President Obama, the State Department has simply waited for Venezuela to collapse, as it inevitably will.

In August 2003, around 3.2m signatures were collected for a recall referendum against Chávez, provided for in the constitution. These were rejected by the National Electoral Council (CNE) on the grounds of being put together before the midpoint of the Presidential term; the government then raided CNE and seized the petitions. In September, the opposition collected a new set of signatures, some 3.6m: rejected by the CNE on the grounds that many were invalid. Riots which killed nine and injured 1200 followed this decision. The petitioners appealed to the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court, which reinstated 800,000 signatures, bringing the total to well over the 2.4m required; but this was overturned by the Court’s Constitutional Chamber, and again, the government seized the list.

Eventually, the referendum was granted – but only after the list of signatories was posted online by Luis Tascón, member of the National Assembly and government supporter. On television, Chávez boasted about the list, warning darkly that “those who sign against Chávez are signing against their country… against the future”; and that all signatories would “remain registered in history, because they’d have to put their name, last name, signature, ID number and fingerprint”.

Signatories now found themselves fired, denied jobs, denied official documents, threatened and intimidated by government-backed militias. Many fled the country. When it came, the referendum was rigged, as subsequent elections have been. The list itself can still be bought even now from market stalls in Caracas for a few dollars.

When supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, or the man himself, defend Venezuelan ‘democracy’, they are actually defending a police state: in which opposition leaders are jailed, and opposition supporters intimidated and worse by militias. Despite being one of the world’s most oil-rich nations, it’s a basket case. There is no paper or toilet paper on the shelves; the puppet Parliament has given Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’ successor, the right to rule by decree; Maduro falls back on comically suggesting that the Americans will bomb Venezuela, and sabre rattling against neighbouring Colombia and Guyana; food shortages remain endemic; murder, kidnapping and violent crime have reached epidemic proportions. Chávismo, whatever it stood for to begin with, has failed.

In Ecuador, meanwhile, President Rafael Correa uses millions of dollars from the country’s intelligence budget to censor and remove online videos and other information critical of him. The last remaining freedom of expression NGO was ordered by the government to close earlier this month, despite recording more than 600 attacks against journalists over the last four years. Amnesty International has accused Correa of restricting “core human rights of freedoms of assembly, association and expression in Ecuador”.

And in Argentina, which took to inventing its own inflation figures out of thin air, has imposed strict currency controls, and where the media has found itself under continual government attack, the as yet unexplained death of Alberto Nisman, a federal prosecutor investigating the 1994 car bombing of the Jewish Centre in Buenos Aires, again brought into focus a country where corruption is rife, the intelligence services have alarming amounts of unchecked power, and where freedom of the press is, in practice, significantly lacking. The peso was devalued by 20% in 2014; further devaluation is likely next year, and on the black markets, the currency has fallen much further.

The response of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has been, again, to sabre rattle: against Britain over the Falklands, American hedge fund managers, even Uruguay over a pulp mill. Peronism, a political doctrine which essentially stands for nothing, depends on this sort of populism. It’s a mistake to view Kirchner as a socialist; she’s not. She’s a neo-corporatist who buys off the poor while providing no genuine long term help, while encouraging a cult of personality – anathema to fully functioning republics, as the speech below beautifully explains – common to the leaders mentioned above, as well as Evo Morales in Bolivia. None of these countries are success stories; none should be cited by any sort of serious, grown-up Left as models to be emulated.

With the Brazilian economy in crisis, its oligarchs still hugely powerful (demonstrated by the FIFA scandal as much as anything else), and Dilma Rousseff weighed down by corruption allegations, what does that leave? Peru to an extent; Chile and Uruguay. On the South American Left, only the latter two countries (routinely cited in surveys as safest, least corrupt, and offering the continent’s best quality of life) have been consistent successes over the last decade: in both cases, by remaining moderate, non-ideological, and seeking to bring the whole country with them. Not cynically dividing them and engaging in what, in Argentina to an extent and Venezuela especially, has often amounted to political warfare against legitimate opponents.

Michelle Bachelet’s Chile is often described, albeit dubiously, as South America’s only First World country. The politics of its government? For want of a better term, Blairite. But the country itself is not remotely left wing, and closer ideologically to Colombia (which has increasing ties with the US) than the rest of the continent. Bachelet, moreover, is now enduring historically appalling approval ratings: which encouraged Latin American conspiracy theories regarding Chile’s recent Copa América triumph on home soil, are predicated mostly on a corruption scandal involving her son and daughter-in-law; and presage, almost certainly, a shift to the Right at the next election. Bachelet’s socialists are in trouble.

All of which brings us to Uruguay: the main focus of this article. A country tiny in population (just 3.4m, almost half of whom live in the capital, Montevideo), plentiful in water supplies and green spaces (geographically, it’s around the size of England and Wales), famous for its football and beef, and where welfarist traditions abound. A century ago, under the watch of celebrated President José Batlle y Ordóñez, Uruguay implemented one of the world’s first genuine welfare states: including unemployment benefit, eight-hour workdays, and huge government intervention in the economy. Many credit the socially cohesive, homogenous society which resulted with helping Uruguay, which became known as the Switzerland of South America, lift the football World Cup in 1930 and 1950.

But after the Second World War, in tandem with the rest of the South Cone, Uruguay fell into increasingly precipitous social and economic decline. The conditions triggering the dictatorship gradually fell into place as the country moved towards the extremes and Leftist activists, the Tupamaros (MLN-T) began robbing banks, gun clubs and other businesses, redistributing the proceeds to the poor. In 1968, faced with serious labour unrest, President Jorge Pacheco enforced a state of emergency and repealed all constitutional protections. Political dissidents were imprisoned and tortured; demonstrations were brutally repressed. The MLN-T responded by morphing into a fully fledged urban guerilla movement, which engaged in political kidnappings, bombings and assassinations.

Among their number was one José Mujica. Apprehended by the authorities on no fewer than four occasions, he ultimately spent 13 years in captivity: including a two-year spell in solitary confinement at the bottom of a well, where his only friends were rats. The insurgency peaked in 1970, and the Tupamaros had collapsed by mid-1972. Combined with the rigging of the 1971 election in favour of Juan María Bordaberry’s Colorado Party, this paved the way for the military to confront the independence of first the judiciary, then the executive, then the legislative. The dictatorship was ushered in in 1973; and at one point, presided over more political prisoners per capita than anywhere else in the world.

Uruguay, though, has always been a curious, idiosyncratic sort of place. Few countries anywhere have been presented with a constitutional plebiscite designed to ratify a military junta, let alone had the courage to reject it: as to their rulers’ shock, the people did in 1980. Even fewer would, at a further referendum, then reject the chance to prosecute those responsible: yet Uruguay did in 2009, despite many of those who had been part of the MLN-T insurgency now being in power.

How had the latter come to pass? Uruguay returned to democracy in 1984; and in the 1990s, embarked on a series of privatisations. Its always important financial sector became alarmingly dependent on Argentinian depositors seeking to hide their savings from prying tax inspectors, and taking advantage of Uruguayan banking secrecy. Uruguay was increasingly economically reliant on its much larger neighbour: meaning when Argentina catastrophically defaulted in December 2001, Uruguay suffered its own enormous financial crash the following year.

The 2002 crisis remains the pivotal watershed in the country since the dictatorship. The banks were shut for a week; hundreds of thousands fell out of the middle class into serious poverty; a lost generation of children brought up in such conditions wasn’t the danger, but the likelihood. Something had to give.

Since the return to democracy, the Leftist Frente Amplio (FA) (Broad Front) had been making gradual progress – but was up against two political leviathans. Between them, the Partido Colorado and Partido Nacional (Blancos) had governed Uruguay ever since its formation in 1830: the former, the party of the cities; the latter, the party of the countryside. No recognisably Leftist party ever usurped this duopoly: albeit the impact of Batlle’s reforms was such that both major parties tended, for the most part, to coalesce around the centre, and rarely attempt anything extreme. Other than the period around the dictatorship, democracy and pluralism (the latter, more than anything, is the cornerstone of Batllismo) were always respected.

The impact of the crash, though, completed the Frente Amplio‘s rise; and for that matter, squared the circle for many involved with the Tupamaros over 30 years earlier. The old politics had failed. Now, by putting together a coalition which encompassed communists, socialists, social democrats, social liberals, centrists and independents all under one banner – uniting the entire Left in a manner which, unfathomably, has still not been attempted in Britain – the ancien régime was swept aside, and Tabaré Vázquez returned as President, with a huge mandate. Vázquez and the FA won 51.7% of the vote, eliminating the need for a Presidential run-off. The governing Colorados were obliterated: collapsing from 32.8% at the 1999 first round to just 10.6%. Usurped in the cities by the FA, in a manner not unlike New Labour’s surge across London and the south-east in 1997, for the Colorados – historically, by far Uruguay’s most successful party – there was no way back.

Vázquez now commenced a comprehensive wave of reforms. Income tax was introduced for the first time; $100m was invested in emergency food and health programmes; the healthcare system itself was turned into an insurance-based scheme accessible to all Uruguayans. Poverty was slashed from 32% to 20%; extreme poverty from 4% to 1.5%. Notably, the government also presided over the One Laptop Per Child (Plan Ceibal) scheme, the first of its kind in the world, which provided every grade school student and teacher in Uruguay with a laptop connected to the internet.

The President further endeared himself to his compatriots by standing up to Argentina during a bizarre dispute over a pulp mill in Fray Bentos. His counterpart, Nestor Kirchner, complained that its construction would contaminate the Uruguay River, which separates the two countries. Bridges over the River were blockaded by enraged locals in Argentina; Kirchner took Uruguay to the International Court of Justice (ICJ); Uruguay threatened to resort to the World Trade Organisation.

The dispute lasted fully 7 years – and was ended by the ICJ ruling that the plant could keep operating, and both governments agreeing to the creation of a bi-national commission which would monitor river pollution. Vázquez later revealed he’d even considered the possibility of a military conflict: and sought the backing of his friend, George W. Bush, and Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s Secretary of State. Just in case.

Ultimately though, what made Vázquez’ success possible was sustained economic growth. GDP rocketed by 10.5% in 2005, and growth averaged 7% over subsequent years. Moreover, what separated the FA from so many Leftist governments across the continent was its pragmatism: cautious, even neoliberal economic policies were pursued, with foreign investment encouraged and inflation controlled. Most of the credit for this was due to the brilliant Danilo Astori, leader of the centrist Asamblea Uruguay and Vázquez’ indispensable finance minister.

Before being swept from power, the old parties had warned that the Left would turn the country into Cuba. Quite the opposite. Looking back, what’s remarkable was how well a coalition of such diverse political positions held; all those within the FA who’d fought for so long to achieve power and change Uruguay never lost sight of the bigger picture. The President, meanwhile, was in his element: an oncologist by profession, he’d been entrusted with a patient in near terminal condition, successfully removed the tumour and given it a new lease of life.

Tabaré Vázquez

Uruguay’s constitution does not allow a President to serve two consecutive terms. So Vázquez, who basked in extraordinary approval ratings of 80%, departed; and the overwhelming success of his government made Mujica, his very different successor, a virtual shoo-in. This was indeed quite a story. 25 years earlier, Mujica had been in captivity; 39 years earlier, after being shot six times by police, the then guerilla had been fighting for his life in a Montevideo hospital. Now, Uruguay’s answer to Nelson Mandela became its unique, truly one-of-a-kind head of state.

When they travel to other continents, Uruguayans are used to being asked just where their country is. “Is it in Africa?”, enquire some. “Part of Argentina?”, wonder others. Two men have done a huge amount to change this and put the place on the map. Footballing icon Luis Suárez; and Pepe Mujica. The world’s humblest President: who lives on a farm, grows his own food, gave 90% of his salary to charity, never wears a tie in any circumstances, and whose sole, cherished possession is a 1987 Volkswagen Beetle.

Pepe and his beloved Beetle

I moved to Uruguay in February 2012. When I arrived, people I spoke with were embarrassed by Mujica. “We can’t have a President who behaves like this!”, they wailed. “It looks terrible for us!” I thought it was wonderful, and told them as much: “We’d go crazy for someone like him in Europe!” For Mujica then, read Corbyn now? There are parallels: not only in their politics and peculiar appeal, but their humility.

That very humility, indeed, was why contrary to what might’ve been expected, Mujica initially consolidated his predecessor’s moderation and good sense. Astori was now Vice-President: under his watch, growth and stability continued, while the President kept those on the far Left of the coalition at bay. In the meantime, the FA married social liberalism with social democracy: passing legislation allowing abortion, equal marriage, and proposing that the sale of cannabis be regulated.

This latter idea was what sprung Mujica into global prominence. What’s rather less known, though, is that next to nothing has actually happened. Cannabis is the perfect example of how Mujica’s image is not matched by the reality: many Uruguayans believe he was much more concerned with how he appeared overseas than making a substantive difference at home; some, of the more cynical variety, even think that where Pepe’s concerned, it’s mostly all an act.

In 2013, Mujica gave a celebrated speech to the UN General Assembly, where he fulminated against the world’s obsession with consumption. He urged a return to simplicity: family, love, free time, a planet based not on markets but on conservation and fraternity. Free time, indeed, is a favourite theme of his; but with the cost of living in Uruguay prohibitively high, it’s not a luxury enjoyed by anything like enough of his people. Dirty, litter-strewn streets and lack of recycling (if you try to recycle things in Uruguay, they’re often taken to the same place as the rubbish!) also sit at odds with the romanticised rhetoric.

Throughout my time in the country, I was always aware of its constant contrasts and contradictions. Of high quality, high speed internet – but which took a month of pleading phone calls and a dozen cancelled appointments for the state owned monopoly, Antel, to finally install. Of buses which are cheap and reliable enough, but on which there isn’t enough room to swing a cat: if you have any luggage, whatever you do, take a taxi. Of taxis which, unlike in Buenos Aires, are safe: it’s just that the drivers fancy themselves as the next Lewis Hamilton and take you halfway round Montevideo first. Of a locale which always, to me, felt safe; but only because of porters in every apartment block, security guards outside every bank… and which was punctuated intermittently by news of a particularly shocking murder.

Most Uruguayans believe the country has never been less safe. Guns are readily available; murder and violent crime has risen alarmingly. Compounding this has been the rather ambiguous view of the government, many of whose members have a pathological distrust of the police thanks to their own awful experiences under the dictatorship. There aren’t many societies where the Interior Minister will blame a murder or robbery on ‘the consumer society… poor people want things too’, but it happens in Uruguay. Similarly, not many countries would, with football hooliganism rife, withdraw the police from a big match not to protect them (as was assumed around the world), but actually to protect football fans (and, it might be added, FA voters) from alleged police brutality. Last year, that happened too.

Again and again, what I noted was an extremely well-meaning government full of Leftist thinkers and academics, but which too often did not fully understand either the consequences of their policies, or the reality on the ground. A reality which, in cost of living, is so grim that the refugees Uruguay took in from Syria amid a huge fanfare last year recently asked to return home.

There were plenty of signs, then, that the FA was tiring during its second term – but as the economy continued to grow, poverty and inequality kept falling (reaching, in both cases, the lowest levels anywhere in Latin America: a fantastic achievement), and services by and large continued to deliver, nowhere near enough reason to kick the government out. In the middle of last year, the youthful, optimistic Luis Lacalle Pou, candidate for the centre-right Blancos, who seemed for all the world to have modelled his campaign on that which thrust David Cameron to prominence in 2005, briefly threatened a huge electoral shock. But as his policies came under scrutiny, his momentum fell away: under the marketing gloss lay not much by way of substance.

In any case, Uruguayans resist change like almost no other people anywhere; and Vázquez, the archetypal safe pair of hands, was back. Plenty of people were disenchanted with the government: but Vázquez is not of the Left, and his was a deeply reassuring presence. So much so that against all predictions, the FA actually improved its position – and in 10 years, almost nothing had changed. It still commanded around a half of the electorate; the Blancos remained stranded in the low 30s, the Colorados in the low teens. Another decade in government suddenly seemed inevitable.

But there was a problem. A large one. Vázquez is now 75, and will be 79 by the time of the 2019 election. Astori, now back to being finance minister, is also 75. Mujica is 80. And while the FA commands huge, vibrant support among young people, beneath these three political giants lies a lost generation: an extraordinary dearth not only of new ideas, but immediate future options. The individuals behind the FA’s rise were all radicalised by the 1970s: but memories of that time are fading, and almost nobody politicised during the 1980s or 1990s is ready to step into the breach.

Not only that, but the FA’s victory was so decisive that now, with their leaders old and tired, the far Left began to demand more. Much more. Fear of electoral defeat had gone; complacency and hubris set in instead. The consequences have eroded the government’s position at an increasingly disorienting pace.

Early this year, Uruguay’s public sector deficit was revealed to be much larger than expected: in fact, at 3.5% of GDP, the figure was almost identical to that during and after the 2002 crash. This owed to wild over-expenditure under Mujica (at whom fingers have been pointed with increasing fury); lower than expected tax revenues; and in particular, an enormous loss made by Antel. 2014 was the fourth consecutive year in which the country’s seven state-owned utilities had made an overall loss. Serious irregularities have since been alleged at Ancap, the state oil company; and gross managerial incompetence at OSE, the state water company.

During my time in Uruguay, there was always this worry in my head. With the unions becoming increasingly powerful but the state-owned companies inefficient and uncompetitive, was I watching some South American version of 1970s Britain slowly playing out before me? By way of warning, together with my students, I used to discuss how Margaret Thatcher had come to power: just as the British unions had rejected In Place Of Strife and paralysed the Callaghan government, would their Uruguayan counterparts end up bringing something similar upon them?

The alarming economic figures – in tandem with significantly slowing growth, inflation threatening to spiral out of control, and the peso dramatically depreciating against the dollar – called for immediate belt-tightening. Unhappily, the unions – and in Parliament, the far Left – saw it rather differently. On August 6, after a whole series of labour disputes, the first general strike in 7 years took place; followed by an ongoing education strike which has crippled the country.

In Uruguay, salaries for teachers are low – yet they’ve risen by 65% since the FA came to power. As well as mammoth pay rises (demands were for starting salaries to increase from $727/month to $1040/month, and an offer of $865/month was rejected), unions insisted that the education budget be ring fenced at 6% of GDP. The context of the country’s overall situation was treated as irrelevant.

In August, teachers walked out of primary, secondary schools and universities. After around a fortnight of this, the government had had enough: issuing, for the first time since Uruguay returned to democracy, an emergency decree. Vázquez declared that education was an essential public service, and effectively banned teachers from striking for 30 days. This amounted to a declaration of war; the unions certainly took it as such. Many teachers simply ignored it. The FA had entirely lost control of its own members.

Officially, with students facing having to work right up to Christmas (the school year usually ends in November) in order to catch up and take their exams, the strike ended without agreement on 3 September: the government stating that if teachers did not agree to an offer of $860/month, the extra money would be invested in school infrastructure. In practice, especially in Montevideo, industrial action continued: culminating in shambolic scenes on 22 September.

A group of high school students, demanding that the 6% of GDP threshold be met, occupied the Codicen building in the city centre. After several days of fruitless negotiations, a police tactical unit cleared the building – and were attacked outside by members of the Taxicab Drivers and Telephone Workers Union (SUATT); the Memory and Justice organisation; as well as what we might euphemistically term, hangers-on looking for trouble.

Images of what happened, and the all too familiar disarray of the police, can be seen here. Codicen is only a few blocks from Uruguay’s Parliament building: onto which, anti-government graffiti was scrawled. It’s difficult to recall another teachers’ strike anywhere which ended in such chaos.

Typically, much of the focus since has been on alleged police brutality: a running theme in Uruguay. The Left is so focused on human rights, and references the 1970s so often, that the police lack the stalwart government backing which is automatic in almost any other democracy. This leaves the police – who are underfunded, under-prepared, and in many cases, have to live in the same areas as criminals liable to threaten them and their families – frightened of taking decisive action for fear of themselves ending up in court; and plays an obvious part in the country’s growing insecurity. Indeed, over three-and-a-half years in what remains a very macho society, I scarcely met a woman who, if I asked them (which spotting a dispiriting theme, I very often did), hadn’t been robbed or mugged at one point or another.

Adding insult to injury, hugely depressing second quarter economic figures were revealed a fortnight ago. Wholly unexpectedly, GDP actually fell 0.1% compared with Q2 2014, compounding a 1.8% contraction over the first quarter of 2015. Now, not only slowdown, but recession seems increasingly possible: for reasons which are part internal, part external.

Uruguay is particularly dependent on Brazil and China, both of which are in trouble. It will not escape the impact of probable Brazilian and Argentinian devaluations next year; serious problems affecting Russia and the eurozone hardly help either. And as the economist, Pablo Rosselli, has highlighted, the government faces three awful dilemmas: between competitiveness and inflation (the latter is nearing the psychologically critical 10%); real wage growth and employment; public spending and deficit reduction. On each of these, the Left of the Frente Amplio is pulling the wearied administration in a direction it neither wants nor can afford to travel in.

If, as seems inevitable given the rapidly strengthening dollar, inflation does go over 10%, those hit most will be the poorest: those the government is most charged with helping. But of course, continued spending is only feasible if the economy grows in tandem. It’s stopped doing so; Astori and his colleagues are trapped.

Can Uruguay navigate a way out of this? It seems doubtful, not least because those charged with doing so are so old, so tired. For the first time in 11 years in power, the Left has taken a good look at Vázquez and realised, to put it bluntly: “He’s not one of us!” So when earlier this month and to the shock of observers, Uruguay walked out of negotiations over the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) – which has proven every bit as controversial as its more famous big brother, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – this was a clear case of the tail wagging the dog. The government did so under pressure from the unions; and that Vázquez made such a move well before it was clear what the agreement would actually involve underscored a loss of authority already apparent during last year’s election campaign, which could also be seen in stark terms during the education dispute.

Meanwhile, Mujica, probably the only man who could bring the Left to heel, has lamentably failed to do so, and continues to wax lyrical about some fantasy world unrecognisable to almost all Uruguayans. It’s not been lost on this observer that things started to go wrong domestically almost the moment that Pepe was discovered on the world stage, and began preoccupying himself with his image further afield.

Pulled between Left and Right, the Frente Amplio is as good as broken – but given it’s always been such a loose coalition, perhaps the only surprise should be that it’s taken so long. If you imagine a governing bloc whose two most important, powerful figures are 75-year-old Tony Blair and 80-year-old Jeremy Corbyn, you get a sense of how impossible this conundrum is to solve. The administration has faced more difficulty in six months than over the preceding 10 years; but those problems seem likely to only worsen.

Perhaps much of this is natural. Governments always tire after more than a decade in office; economics are always cyclical too. But there is in all of this a parable. As long as we live in a world of globalised free markets and interdependence – as long as corporations can up and leave if governments seek to put their taxes up – there will only ever be so much that any social democratic party anywhere can achieve. More than that, the moment it becomes too ideological, or frustrated supporters who don’t appreciate what they have drag it away from the centre, it hits more and more trouble. This was Labour’s sad experience after it removed Blair; and for all its considerable achievements, it appears increasingly likely to be the fate of Uruguay’s first ever genuine government of the Left too.

Feminism. What does it mean to you? To me, it’s about equality: equality of treatment, equality of respect, equality of opportunity. I don’t understand how anyone can oppose those basic tenets: all discrimination is wrong. And as the feminist movement has brilliantly highlighted over the last half century and more, the discrimination encountered by women, overt and more insidiously, covert, is particularly endemic.

It’s strange, then, how so many men – and surprising numbers of women – treat ‘feminism’ as a dirty word. Opposition to it is so often based on tropes (for example, so-called ‘Feminazis’ seeking to take over the world and/or emasculate men): in fact, many of the more basic critiques essentially owe to the same lazy prejudices still held by so many.

I want to start by setting out a premise. I think most men do not have the remotest idea of what women encounter on a daily basis. To be a woman in the public eye is, very plainly, to require the hide of a rhinoceros. The abhorrent rape and death threats which Stella Creasy, Caroline Criado-Perez and Mary Beard all encountered on Twitter two years ago seemed briefly to prick public consciousness about this: why on earth, asked Creasy, was this not treated in the same way as if someone walked up to her on the street and made the same threats?

To my mind, Creasy has been the most effective front line campaigner for feminism I’ve ever seen in politics. So often (most infamously, Margaret Thatcher), female politicians have broken the glass ceiling, then forgotten to keep publicising the cause of equality, or seek to help other women emulate or better their achievements. Creasy is quite the opposite. Her takedown of Toby Young on Newsnight during that sorry saga not only evidenced his casual, lazy sexism (no Toby, your sin wasn’t to “notice an extremely low cut dress of a particular MP sitting behind Ed Miliband”; it was to tweet about it like some leery schoolboy on heat); it was a masterclass in the vital line separating freedom of speech (or freedom to give offence) from freedom to threaten others. The former is sacrosanct in any civilised society; the latter is unacceptable and indefensible.

It’s true that public male figures have to put up with plenty of abuse too. But in their case, it’s rarely either sexualised or based on their gender. Women, on the other hand? Online, this form of abuse is rampant: as another feminist campaigner, Louise Mensch, demonstrated this week. For the crime of defending her Conservative colleague, David Cameron, in the wake of the most lurid allegations in Lord Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott’s book, Mensch found herself subjected to a whole hail of hideous, vicious, revolting tweets, some of which are set out here.

Not for nothing did Yvette Cooper warn yesterday that online ‘trolling’ (actually, trolling is the harmless act of winding others up, usually via the assertion of a ridiculous opinion. This, on the other hand, is abuse) will inevitably stop some women ever going into politics, the media or business. Moreover, as Nick Cohen highlights in today’s Observer, women make up only 30% of MPs, 25% of judges and 21% of FTSE-100 company directors. To which I’d add the absurd, disgraceful disparity in pay which, 45 years after the Equal Pay Act supposedly outlawed any less favourable treatment between men and women, not only still obtains – but is actually growing.

As Cohen also notes, women are more likely than men to be in low-paid work, head a single-parent household, and live in poverty, especially in old age: a state of affairs which will only worsen under a government which attacks most those who have least. Two women, meanwhile, are murdered by their partners every week. Domestic violence accounts for between 16% and 25% of all recorded violent crime; and rape conviction rates remain appallingly low.

From an ever earlier age, girls find themselves sexualised and judged not on the content of their character, but their appearance. Access to online pornography (which all too often stigmatises and degrades women, and is based for the most part on arousing not female viewers, but male viewers) affects views on and expectations regarding sex of both boys and girls well before they reach the age of consent. And in the workplace, macho attitudes still abound. That’s why Charlotte Proudman reacted as she did when complimented on her LinkedIn profile picture: yes, her response was probably disproportionate, but the context is of a culture which still views women first and foremost through the prism of their appearance.

To many men, Proudman’s response was bewildering. Why wouldn’t a woman want to be complimented on her appearance? Answer: (1) It’s no-one else’s business; (2) It had nothing whatsoever to do with Proudman’s job. Take a look, for example, at the sort of tweets often sent to Isabel Hardman. Hardman is a brilliant, rapidly emerging journalist for The Spectator and increasingly, many other publications – yet this doesn’t stop alarming numbers of comments based on her appearance.

Most of the tweets I’ve linked to here are essentially harmless: with one dreadful exception. But since when do male journalists incur similar responses? They don’t. The same old double standard continues: which, we should add, also applies in television news. Male presenters are routinely kept in the spotlight long after their female counterparts. There’s no reason for this, other than a dreadfully cliched stereotype that associates men with gravitas and authority, women with looking pretty and providing ‘eye candy’.

Sexism, then, is everywhere. It exists in just about all facets of society – and women bear the enormous brunt of it. Why should they? Because “it’s always been this way”? We used to bait badgers, drown witches and treat women as their husband’s property too; women, indeed, have always been treated as second-class citizens in a world designed according to what suits men. No-one who believes in equality can defend this – and however much progress has been made, we’re nowhere near real equality as yet.

Then, much more alarmingly, is the colossal amount of violent abuse which goes largely unreported. Sex trafficking – the modern day slave trade – across Europe: in which women (often even below the age of consent) forced into selling their bodies are described as ‘sex workers’ when the reality is one of systematic, constant rape. Child pornography is described as such when, by definition, child pornography cannot exist. The accurate term is child rape. Horrendously widespread cases of systematic abuse of children and young women in Rotherham, Derby, Oxford, Telford, Bristol, Rochdale, and many other areas besides, especially in northern England. And worse: the very real fear is that those cases are the tip of a hideous, shocking iceberg.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with a friend of mine. Quietly, painstakingly, she told me about the times men had followed her or chased her down the street; the catcalls she so often receives; the hands on her body in or out of nightclubs when this hadn’t been invited. And she also told me about when, as a teenager, stories about friends of hers being raped became more and more commonplace.

In 2015, do we have a society in which women feel able to speak out about this sort of horror? No, we don’t. In fact, women with the courage to tell their stories very often find themselves abused, smeared or blamed by a society which just does not want to know; which downplays it at every opportunity; which shamefully treats victims of rape as responsible in some way for their experiences. Rape is a life sentence; public ignorance which continues to surround it only further compounds the agony of all too many victims.

There are, then, abundant reasons why the feminist movement is so important: why it must continue to speak out and demand action across all areas. Of all Britain’s political parties, Labour has most often done so, and is becomingly increasingly feminist in its approach. I regarded its manifesto this year as by far its most feminist ever; and all the better for it.

But there’s a problem: a growing one. Difficult to articulate, especially in light of all I’ve set out above; but it does, nonetheless, need to be said. In Labour’s case, it revolves around tokenism over substance; positive discrimination which, in terms of the electorate it needs to vote for it, is increasingly counter-productive to the party’s aims. Above all, its feminist ones.

The idea behind All-Women Shortlists (AWS) is entirely laudable: to redress the continued gender imbalance in the House of Commons and, in this specific case, among Labour MPs. In terms of numbers, there’s no doubting their success: from a risible 3% of MPs when Harriet Harman first entered Parliament in 1982, women now make up a still completely unacceptable 29% of the Commons. 43% of Labour’s MPs are female; the Tories lag well behind on 21% (up from a stupefyingly awful 9% as recently as 10 years ago).

Nobody in Labour has done more for women’s rights than Harriet Harman

The argument made by Labour’s AWS proponents is, naturally, that these should continue until the 50% mark is reached among MPs. But what’s interesting is, at the same time as Labour has hugely increased its number of women MPs, it’s produced more and more robotic, machine politicians: frequently parachuted into constituencies, seen by increasing proportions of the public as looking the same, sounding the same, and having nothing of any importance to say.

That isn’t, incidentally, to blame women in any way. This is a Labour problem, not a women problem. Imagine any constituency: in which there might be 10 aspiring male candidates, 10 aspiring female ones. Instead of having 20 talented options to whittle down and choose from, Labour deliberately restricts itself. Then multiply that over the scores and scores of constituencies where it does this. By deliberately narrowing the field of talent before it’s even begun, Labour ends up with a Parliamentary Party which just isn’t as adept as it otherwise would be.

Does that mean I’m somehow arguing women are less capable than men in politics? No, not at all. In some strange parallel universe of men-only shortlists, I’d be making the exact same point. I’m highlighting the frightening paucity of talent throughout British politics, which applies equally to both men and women. In Labour’s case, this summer, three of its four candidates for leader were astonishingly unable to argue a clear, coherent, passionate case on almost anything; the sheer banality of the contest was what left the field open for Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide. Any party which ends up in such a position – all its ‘establishment’ options being so profoundly unimpressive – very obviously has a problem.

Just over a year ago, Austin Mitchell, outgoing Labour MP for Great Grimsby, attempted to make a similar point to Creasy on the BBC. Emphasis here on attempted: because for the crime of correctly describing AWS as ‘undemocratic’, he was shouted down by his colleague and barely allowed to get a word in. Have a look at the comments below the video: that sort of thing plays appallingly with the public, but Labour’s future is in that very public’s gift. And as all sorts of studies since the general election have shown, the electorate has a huge problem with the moralising self-righteousness of many on the left.

Sadly, the same self-righteousness was again on display as Corbyn announced his Shadow Cabinet. Against a backdrop of just one third of David Cameron’s Cabinet being female, that Corbyn was announcing the first majority female Cabinet or Shadow Cabinet in British history might, you would imagine, have been cause for some celebration. Quite the contrary. In fact, the focus of not only the press, but disgraceful numbers of Labour MPs, was that no woman had been handed the shadow of one of the four great offices of state (Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary).

Yesterday, Harman demanded Corbyn “sort it out so we have women’s leadership at the top of the party”. But this was nothing compared to Jess Phillips, recently elected MP for Birmingham Yardley: who complained about Corbyn’s failure to promote any women to the most senior posts, then roundly told Diane Abbott to “fuck off” when she interjected.

Phillips, in fairness to her, has since apologised. But what’s alarming here is, to be blunt, a palpable sense of entitlement. All the posts in Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet were his gift to dispose; it was his job to appoint those he thought best for the job. To be sure, you can argue whether those he selected are best qualified – but it’s beside the point. “We must have women in the four great offices”? No. Only if they are deemed best for the job must they be given those roles.

As Corbyn’s appointments were leaking out, Helen Lewis, Deputy Editor of the New Statesman,noted acidly that “Jeremy Corbyn has married more women than he’s appointed to great offices of state”. Strangely, I can recall nothing from her fulminating against the lack of women writers on her publication. Nor, for that matter, anything from anyone in the media castigating the organisations they work for over the paucity of female political journalists. One self-aggrandising rule for them, another for Corbyn? It certainly seems that way.

Stephen Bush, Lewis’ colleague, went even further: comparing the huge difference between Corbyn’s vote this year and Abbott’s in 2010, and asserting on the basis of precisely nothing that “it is difficult… to argue that none of (the gap) was the result of racism and/or sexism”. Mindbogglingly, despite a piece which noted Sadiq Khan’s triumph in the Mayoral race, Bush even hinted at Labour having an ethnic minority problem too (in which case Stephen, how did Khan win?).

What Bush did was take a cosmetic, tokenistic view of an much more complex question. Corbyn, Tom Watson and Khan all won their respective contests because they were seen as the best candidates. Like Corbyn, Khan has huge support among the base of the party, while Watson has built up roots within it over a very considerable time. All three are very distinctive politicians: nobody views them as parrots or machines. And where Corbyn was concerned, the difference between now and 2010 was a profoundly different dynamic within the much enlarged party: caused primarily by the impact of austerity. A study of how many Labour members who voted for David Miliband in 2010 yet chose Corbyn this year would make very interesting reading.

In the case of Bush, Lewis, Phillips, Harman and many others, it simply won’t do to say “a woman didn’t win or didn’t get one of the biggest jobs; ergo we have a woman problem”. It treats an issue of profound importance – feminism and equality – in a completely shallow way. And in the case of the Shadow Cabinet, it’s not actually that far removed from Ashcroft’s extraordinary conduct in 2010. He tried to buy his way into the government and is furious this failed. Labour’s women have demanded particular patronage but not based this demand on merit either.

Just as Ashcroft seems divorced from reality in his complaints, those Labour MPs who criticised Corbyn seem to believe they aremore important than those they represent; the people they are supposed to serve. On AWS, the appearance to much of the public must surely be similar. Yet that very same public increasingly decides general elections based almost entirely on the quality and credibility of the party leaders. Nowadays, they must almost always be photogenic, televisually effective, slick (despite the public so often complaining about that sort of politics, it repeatedly returns Cameron or Tony Blair, while rejecting Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown or William Hague) – and have some sort of indefinable X-factor.

On the basis of who the party leaders happen to be stands the entire future of the country and destiny of millions; thousands live or die depending on who the government of the day is. Yet in Labour’s case, by deliberately reducing the talent available to it in winnable constituencies, it thereby also reduces its field of potential leaders… and hence, makes it more difficult for itself to win elections. An incredible state of affairs: which with the Tories overseeing draconian cuts which are disproportionately harmful to women, often has tragic, even lethal consequences.

“Women’s leadership at the top of the party”, Harriet? Sure – as soon as a woman is considered the best choice for leader by its members. Anything else is to treat politics as some self-indulgent game, and ignore the consequences of not choosing a leader, Shadow Cabinet members or candidates for Parliament based purely and solely on merit. Harman, indeed, is simultaneously the individual in the Labour Party who’s done more to advance women’s rights and equality than anyone else (for which she was deservedly acclaimed yesterday); and a twice atrocious caretaker leader, who first allowed the Tories to take over the economic narrative and blame Labour for the crash, then blundered horrendously over welfare reform: while remaining the weak, ineffectual Commons performer she always was. Equality of treatment demands she be assessed on her periods as leader; she failed, miserably.

Similarly, as Cooper bemoans the extent of online misogyny and reminds us of her role with Sure Start, she neglects to mention that as Work and Pensions Secretary, she made the work capability assessment – one of the most disgusting, profoundly anti-women initiatives launched by any government in decades – much, much harsher. The warnings regarding this were set out at the time. Cooper also failed to oppose the horrendously anti-women Welfare Reform Bill in July. Is that what you call ‘feminism’, Yvette?

Yvette Cooper: often talks a better game than she practices

In the end, given the profound inequality and injustice which women continue to experience throughout society, feminism in politics can’t be about the cherry on top. It has to be about the cake beneath: about everything Labour does being geared towards winning. If Labour does not win, it cannot implement a feminist agenda; but by obsessing over gender politics in appearance, not substance, it unwittingly makes it harder to help women in the first place. Instead, they’re left to the mercy of a Tory government, with appalling consequences.

Of course, I write all this as a man. Perhaps no man can ever truly understand feminism 100%; perhaps no man can ever be a true feminist. But let me be very clear: I’m a man who is desperate for a Labour government, appalled at the lives being destroyed by austerity, and acutely aware of its iniquitous impact on women. It disgusts me. The injustice which women face on a daily basis has always disgusted me. In such a context, that Labour makes it harder for itself to win by continuing all-women shortlists and systematically reducing the talent available to it across the country right when it’s so up against it (if you don’t believe me, read this; then if it hasn’t sunk in, read it again until it does) and needs to reach out to everyone, male and female alike, isn’t only absurd. It’s a complete abdication of responsibility.

In December 1824, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, received a decidedly unpromising piece of correspondence. One Joseph Stockdale, pornographer and scandal-maker, informed him that he would shortly be publishing the memoirs of Harriette Wilson, notorious high-class London courtesan. Contained in these memoirs would be:

Various anecdotes of Your Grace which it would be most desirable to withhold, at least such is my opinion. I have stopped the Press for the moment, but as the publication will take place next week, little delay can necessarily take place.

On Stockdale’s part, this was a naked attempt at blackmail. Wellington, national hero (not to mention devoted husband and father) was being asked to pay money to be left out of the sordid publication. His response entered the annals of fame. “Publish and be damned!”

It is unknown whether any such conversations took place between Lord Ashcroft – co-author of Call Me Dave, another explosive book about a Tory prime minister shortly to hit the shelves – and David Cameron, its subject. It must be presumed not. But while Wilson’s memoirs had no effect on Wellington’s reputation or popularity, will the same be true of Cameron?

Thus far, the focus has been on an admittedly amusing but rather grotesque tale involving young David and a pig. And the emphasis here should be on tale, given the spectacular failure of either Ashcroft or Isabel Oakeshott, his co-author, to verify the account. Of itself, it’s a piece of salacious gossip, likely to seriously harm Oakeshott’s hard won reputation. Ashcroft, as we shall see, is rather above such things, however.

The book also highlights Cameron’s use of marijuana at university – no shocks or anything significant there – and his belonging to various private clubs known for their hedonism and excess. Again: what’s the story here? But today’s revelations, which won’t be discussed anything like as much, are actually of considerably more import.

There has always been a question about David Cameron. Namely: does he understand or even care about those less privileged than he is? Somehow, through 10 years as Conservative leader, five as prime minister, nothing has ever stuck to him. Just like his role model, Tony Blair, the public view him as a likeable enough centrist; a safe pair of hands, someone they can trust.

That likeability means Cameron has always been able to obscure the sheer, wanton venality of much of his government: which lays waste to the welfare state; deliberately sets the young against the old; presides over thousands of deaths as a (direct or indirect) result of benefit sanctions so punitive, they’re being investigated by the United Nations; helped precipitate the European refugee crisis by bombing Libya, abandoning it, and turning it into a failed state; unbelievably wanted to bomb the Syrian government, and effectively do something which would help Da’esh, the most evil organisation seen anywhere since the Nazis; deliberately undermines democracy by changing voter registration rules; is very clearly trying to not just defeat, but destroy the Labour Party, with catastrophic consequences for democracy; and above all, never gives the impression of being interested in governing the country. Only for itself and people like it.

People, curiously enough, like the ‘Chipping Snorton set’, serialised in the Daily Mail today. 500 of the UK’s richest, most powerful and best-connected: a veritable British Bilderberg, if Ashcroft and Oakeshott’s description is taken entirely at face value. “Whatever happens in the marquee will stay in the marquee… whenever anyone new is invited to one of these gatherings, their name requires the approval of all”.

Leaving aside the image this unintentionally conjures up of something roughly akin to the mansion scene in Eyes Wide Shut (like the authors of Call Me Dave, I have nothing if not an over-active imagination), this section alludes to the alarming fusion between British politicians and the media. Among the guests at a New Year’s party in 2008 were Cameron (then Leader of the Opposition), George Osborne (then Shadow Chancellor), Andy Coulson, then Tory Director of Communications and former editor of the News of the World; Alan Yentob and Mark Thompson of the BBC; and Rupert Murdoch’s daughter, Elisabeth.

Andy Coulson

History records the trouble which Coulson, Rebekah Brooks (and for a time, Cameron) later found themselves in. Before the serialisation of this book, we might’ve theorised that relations between certain movers and shakers in the British press were dangerously incestuous (in a strictly metaphorical sense, of course) with some of the country’s leaders. Now we know they were.

More than that: how can someone who continually moves in such high company, is so at ease amid such wealth and excess, possibly have the remotest sense of the impact of his government not only on the poorest, the weakest… but merely on the common man? Plenty of Tory prime ministers came from privileged backgrounds; plenty were patrician in nature. But Cameron? While he speaks of governing as a One Nation Tory, in practice, he governs as a One South-East England Tory, and anecdotes like the above explain why.

Elsewhere, today’s segments in the Mail underscore Cameron’s hopelessly naive, wilfully incompetent approach to both Libya and Syria: with military expertise ignored and sidelined, just as it often was in Iraq during Blair’s time. Lessons have not been learned; so much so that in Libya, as Michael Ancram correctly puts it, Cameron “did an Iraq”. This is not the conduct of a statesman acting in Britain’s best interests; but someone whose calculations are always short term and nakedly political: with far reaching consequences.

Cameron, of course, been been marked by personal tragedy. The book also movingly outlines the torment and heartbreak which Cameron and his wife, Samantha, experienced over the death of their son, Ivan. In April, Samantha spoke at length to the Mail on Sunday about that awful time, revealing how hard they had fought to get Ivan into the special needs daycare centre he desperately needed; and were able to afford night care, which eased the horrendous strain on their marriage:

Looking after a disabled child pushes you to the limits of what you can cope with…physically, emotionally… By the end of the first year we’d both been working and Ivan needed 24-hour care. We were totally shattered and pretty much at breaking point.

Cameron frequently references this tragedy in his speeches, often to reassure the public of his commitment to the NHS. Yet in light of his family’s experience, it is extraordinary how savagely carers have been hit by austerity; and that the very respite care which the Camerons depended upon is being cut by local authorities.

Changes were made to the Disability Living Allowance under the coalition; and catastrophically, the Independent Living Fund has been axed: removing at a stroke the chance for severely disabled people to lead more independent lives. To live with dignity. Restrictions and cuts to the Employment Support Allowance would simply be the icing on a quite despicable cake.

Ask yourself: how can someone who knows how demanding it is to raise a disabled child, who knows how incredibly important high quality care for that child was, possibly oversee such abhorrent cuts? The answer could only be that David Cameron does not understand what life is like for those without the wealth he and his family enjoy; nor, it must be concluded, does he care either.

Today, The Sun is leading with news of a party in 2011, attended by the prime minister and his wife, where guests were openly “snorting cocaine in various rooms and in the toilets… the extraordinary thing is the guests didn’t feel they were doing anything wrong by taking drugs around the PM”. Yet also in 2011, by express order of the government, posting stupid messages on Facebook was punished with four years in jail; and a student with no previous convictions was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for stealing bottled water worth £3.50. There were many other such cases too. One rule for the rich, another for the poor: that is the story of Cameron’s time in charge of this country.

Will any or all of the examples set out by Ashcroft and Oakeshott bring the PM down? No. It’s the narrative they speak to which is so troubling, however – and with the revelations set to keep coming for several days yet, will have a drip-drip effect, embarrassing Cameron and weakening his authority bit by bit.

Much more serious for him, though – and more than that, for British democracy – are the enemies he has made during his premiership. Two in particular: Rupert Murdoch, and that man Ashcroft. As the only thing which ever concerns Cameron are the opinion polls, he was mightily quick to distance himself from Brooks and Coulson following their arrests for suspected phone-hacking; while Murdoch was found by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee to be “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company”. The protection which The Digger had so long enjoyed from British governments of all hues was at last denied him.

Murdoch at Leveson

In May, in a piece for Open Democracy, I noted Murdoch’s subsequent support for the SNP and the instrumental role of an opinion poll commissioned for the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times, published 12 days before the Scottish independence referendum. This was the only poll with a sample size of more than 1000 in the entire campaign to favour ‘Yes’; yet the panic it triggered across the British establishment resulted in The Vow, and Labour’s eventual meltdown across Scotland.

I also noted Ashcroft’s extraordinarily rapid rise to prominence as polling guru (despite not being a pollster himself, nor revealing where his company buys its data from) and “friend of the political process” – as well as how, after a general election campaign in which the polls were completely wrong throughout, the result could, only as the happiest of coincidences of course, hardly have been better for someone who (a) had long since fallen out with Cameron; but (b) certainly didn’t want a Labour government either. A tiny Tory majority, boxing Cameron in and making his life impossible, bringing his exit closer and ensuring a quick transition to someone more amenable; someone by the name of ‘Boris’? Perfect. Yet uncannily how things turned out.

On the BBC yesterday, Oakeshott protested that if the book “was just a revenge job, then Lord Ashcroft and I could have published it before the election”. As she well knows, this is nonsense: Ashcroft may hate Cameron, but he doesn’t hate the Tories, and was hardly going to cut his nose off to spite his face. This book is about reminding the Conservative Party where the true power really lies; and disturbingly for Cameron, it isn’t with him at all.

Isabel Oakeshott

Ashcroft, indeed, has been quite open about his motivations. A “not insignificant job” was promised in the build-up to the 2010 election, only for him to be offered the trifle of junior whip in the Foreign Office:

After putting my neck on the line for nearly ten years – both as party treasurer under William Hague and as deputy chairman – and after ploughing some £8m into the party, I regarded this as a declinable offer. It would have been better had Cameron offered me nothing at all.

Imagine just how untouched by the vicissitudes of public opinion and colossally removed from everyday life someone must be to openly acknowledge being motivated by bitterness against the prime minister because of failure to buy a prestigious post in the government. Imagine, too, how this bitterness can actually include said prime minister’s handling of his then non-domiciled tax status. Ashcroft, while paying no tax in Britain, was nonetheless able to make an enormous financial difference to its most successful political party; and indeed, practically rescue it from bankruptcy in the dark days of the late 1990s.

News of his tax status finally emerged in March 2010, the worst possible moment for the Tories. Ashcroft’s name became mud throughout the election campaign, undermining Conservative hopes. In light of that, Cameron would’ve had to have been mad to have given the noble Lord a big job afterwards: but in twenty-first century Britain, the politics of patronage are still alarmingly pre-eminent, as Cameron’s recent stuffing of the Lords with Tory placemen demonstrated.

The problem is this. In this so-called ‘democracy’, money – lots of it – buys influence and it buys power. When, as in Murdoch or Ashcroft’s cases, it fails for any reason to do so, whoever incurs their wrath – including a prime minister who is himself the beneficiary of colossal privilege – had better watch out. The people? Their needs? They come way, way, way down the list.

Consider for a moment the curious case of former Tory MP, Louise Mensch. Once considered a rising star at Westminster, Mensch enjoyed her finest moment in July 2011, when questioning Murdoch and his son James while on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Her questions were “sharp, precise and coolly scornful”; she even asked one of the most powerful men in the world whether he had considered resigning.

Three days later, she received an email from an ‘investigative journalist’ named ‘David Jones’ alleging that she had taken drugs with Nigel Kennedy while working at EMI records during the 1990s. Her wonderfully brassy response – “Although I do not remember the specific incident, this sounds highly probable… I am not a very good dancer and must apologise to any and all journalists who were forced to watch me dance that night at Ronnie Scott’s” – endeared her to many new admirers and appeared to have nipped matters in the bud. Appeared.

Louise Mensch

In April 2012, contrary to her severe questioning of the Murdochs during the inquiry, Mensch disagreed publicly with Tom Watson and Paul Farrelly over whether the Committee’s conclusion of Murdoch’s unfitness had been discussed prior to Watson’s tabling of a Commons amendment. She described the report as “partisan”; while Watson went on to accuse her of tabling pro-Murdoch amendments which would’ve “exonerated” James, and allege that private conversations had been leaked to News Corp.

In August, citing family reasons, Mensch unexpectedly stood down as an MP. In January 2013, she became a columnist… for Murdoch’s Sun on Sunday. Thus had the woman who made her name speaking truth to power abruptly jumped ship and started working for that very power. I leave it to readers to join the dots.

Almost comically, Mensch can now be found on Twitter excoriating Oakeshott; but not her co-author, Ashcroft. Within the space of a few tweets, she derides Oakeshott as a “former journalist” and a “novelist”, and states she has “nothing but contempt for her”; yet she “remains a big fan of Lord Ashcroft”. Consider the utter absurdity of that position (not least from a self-proclaimed feminist): she attacks the monkey relentlessly, yet continues to indulge the organ grinder.

Like David Cameron, Louise Mensch is a very wealthy, successful, even – in relative terms – powerful individual. But that wealth and power are nothing when set against that of Ashcroft or Murdoch… and she knows which side her bread’s buttered on. She now faces the rather invidious prospect of working for someone, Murdoch, who may well – especially with Brooks ominously restored at The Sun – be about to commence a campaign to bring down her other boss, Cameron. If he does, she can only watch on helplessly from the sidelines.

One final point. As well as personal spite and fury, what is the motive on the part of these two colossally powerful men? The EU referendum. Both favour British withdrawal; both will have been left aghast by Cameron’s efforts at manning the big battalions in support of the UK remaining. Forcing him out before the campaign really begins in earnest must be the goal: but if so, the PM’s only option is to bunker down and hang on for grim death.

It’s not the stories by themselves which will bring Cameron down. It’s the men behind those stories. Some enemies are just too big to make; and since his as dubious as it gets purchase of The Times and Sunday Times in 1981, no British political leader has managed to get on Murdoch’s bad side and survive to tell the tale. In the bitterest of ironies, the Old Etonian prime minister may himself be about to discover that in British politics, money doesn’t talk. It swears.

Let me let you into Westminster’s worst kept secret. There is no chance – absolutely no chance – of Jeremy Corbyn leading Labour into the 2020 General Election. Corbyn is 66 now; at the time of the next election, he’ll be a few weeks short of seventy-one. The demands of modern political life make leadership no place for a septuagenarian.

But even if Corbyn were younger, there’d be no chance then either. This is someone who’s spent his entire political life on the backbenches, immersed in the politics of protest. He’ll never have even dreamt of making it to the Labour front bench, let alone the leadership; more to the point, he won’t have wanted to either. His performance (sic) so far as leader is an ample illustration why: Corbyn knows he’s been wildly over-promoted; that he isn’t up to the task of a job which requires authority and control over his party and its message. This is The Peter Principle writ large.

The Tories know it: that’s why they’ve already started insinuating that not Corbyn, but Labour en masse, are a “threat to security”. Dan Hodges knows it; Nick Cohen has called for it; Stephen Bush, as he hinted on Thursday, knows it too. Absurd though it might sound only a week into Corbyn’s leadership, the question for Labour is (1) How to replace him; (2) When; (3) With whom?

Two theories are doing the rounds. One involves Tom Watson (as she was the first to suggest it, even while the leadership contest was still ongoing, let’s call it the Mensch Thesis); the other, Alan Johnson. Let’s call that the Pedley Thesis, and take the second one first. On Thursday, Keiran Pedley set out his view that the genial Johnson, longtime Tony Blair loyalist, former General Secretary of the Union of Communication Workers, and who can now often be found making merry on Andrew Neil’s comfy sofa, could be the man Labour coalesce around midway through the Parliament, much as the Tories did with Michael Howard in 2003.

In my view, since Denis Healey was fatefully rejected in 1980, Labour have only produced three individuals who could have won a General Election in most circumstances: Blair of course, David Miliband… and that man Johnson. A major part of why Blair hung on so long after the Iraq debacle was his desperation that someone emerged who could stop Gordon Brown making a Horlicks of all his and New Labour’s good work. With his innate, preternatural political instincts as sharp as ever, Blair knew Brown wasn’t remotely successful Prime Ministerial material; but one man in his Cabinet was.

When, following an internal coup against him fronted by Watson in 2006, Blair announced preparations for his departure the following year, who was the friend by his side? Johnson. This wasn’t a coincidence. Over the nine-and-a-half months which remained, given Miliband was still too wet behind the ears, Blair must’ve hoped that Johnson could rise in prominence enough to credibly challenge Brown for the succession – but there was a problem. An insurmountable one. Johnson didn’t want the job. He never has.

British political history is full of counter-factual talking points. If Margaret Thatcher hadn’t been forced out by her own party, and instead allowed to lead it to defeat in 1992, the fratricidal nature of her exit wouldn’t have poisoned the Tories for so long afterwards. If Labour had won the 1992 election, but then faced Black Wednesday just five months later, goodness knows what existential damage this would’ve wrought. If John Smith had lived, Labour would never have moved so far rightwards and alienated (until last weekend, that is), so much of its core support. If Brown had called a snap election in 2007, David Cameron would almost certainly have been defeated, ousted by his party in favour of a right-winger, and Labour might well still be in power even now.

That Brown didn’t – he bottled it because of Cameron’s inheritance tax pledge – remains the most significant political watershed of this generation. His paralysis in the face of a glaring opportunity confirmed Blair’s worst fears and left Labour on the rack. They’ve never recovered since.

But in Summer 2009, as Brown reeled from catastrophic local and European results, there was another chance. Various ministers resigned; The Guardian called for the Prime Minister to do the honourable thing. With Labour hopelessly placed in the polls, perhaps recognising what a hospital pass the premiership seemed to represent, now – pace Michael Portillo 1995 – it was Miliband’s turn to dither. And again, Johnson clearly wasn’t interested.

Between then and the 2010 election, the horrendously unpopular Brown turned an insurmountable 20-point deficit into, with the aid of the Clegg bounce, a hung Parliament. Imagine how much better the outcome would’ve been for Labour had either Miliband or Johnson grasped the nettle: as a minimum, they’d have surely been the largest party. No Cameron and Osborne; no Liberal Democrat wipe-out this year; no Tory-led slash and burn, but Labour-led trim and singe instead.

Even then, after the wrong brother won the Labour leadership, there were further opportunities to oust the poorly performing Ed during the last Parliament. With David having exiled himself in New York, once more, the only man Labour could realistically have united around was Johnson; once more, loyalty to his party and his own very real humility trumped any ambitions which, to reiterate, he’s never held anyway.

At any point between 2007 and last weekend, Alan Johnson could’ve been the Howard-esque unifying figure which Labour will desperately require post-Corbyn. Had he succeeded Blair, Johnson – with broad appeal across the country and throughout his party, as well as a compelling backstory – could’ve been Labour’s John Major: a vastly more successful one too. But last weekend – and here’s where the Pedley Thesis collapses – the world tilted entirely on its axis.

By opening the leadership contest up, Ed Miliband’s unwitting legacy to the Labour Party was, in effect, its death; and the immediate, Phoenix-like emergence of a new, grassroots-based movement of the left. A long overdue fusion of traditionalism and radical populism. Labour was never going to be miraculously immune from the anti-austerity, anti-neoliberal forces which have propelled the rise of Syriza, Podemos, the SNP or Bernie Sanders; nor the sterilisis which has plagued its social democratic sister parties across Europe. As Britain’s increasingly absurd electoral system strangles new parties at birth, this fusion was the only answer for the left. A personal view is its long term outcome – 10 or 15 years from now, with or without Scotland – will be the implementation of proportional representation.

What does this mean? Put simply, the Blairite wing of the party is finished, for good. That’s why we’re hearing rumours of disgruntled Blairites crossing the floor: they know the game is up. Although he’d furiously protest to the contrary, I suspect this is part of what’s put Cohen’s nose so out of joint; it certainly has with John “who cares about the grassroots?” McTernan. But Johnson, however popular and likeable he remains, is himself a Blairite; and would certainly be seen as such by an infuriated, much expanded membership in the event of Corbyn’s departure.

On Wednesday, Hodges wondered whether “there’s a choice for Labour other than simply embracing Corbynism or returning to Blairism?” The always perceptive Telegraph columnist has already sensed which way the wind’s blowing. What’s happened isn’t just about Corbyn at all; the changes in Labour’s make-up are seismic and irreversible. Centrifugal forces cannot be resisted: there can never be a return to the top-down triangulation of the past.

Where I differ from Stephen Bush, though, is I’d argue that Labour’s soft left were in full-blown retreat after Blair’s accession in 1994; all but vanished altogether; then started making small, baby steps forward during Miliband’s ill-starred leadership. Now, not so much the hard left (who, other than John McDonnell, is of the hard left and among Corbyn’s more senior Shadow Cabinet members?) as the soft left are triumphant.

Not for nothing did Neal Lawson state Labour were as good as dead only to publicly declare for Corbyn, to say nothing of Anthony Barnett and Jeremy Gilbert chiming in with their support: along with, in the latter’s case, his vehement disdain for Blairism. The often mischaracterised Owen Jones, Zoe Williams, Paul Mason and Aditya Chakrabortty are all in the vanguard of the modern soft left; all are hugely supportive of Corbyn, and especially energised by the long term opportunity his victory represents.

Longer term, there’s nothing to stop, say, Stella Creasy, the epitome of the soft left, becoming Labour leader after 2020. She recognises how greatly the party needs to change, always emphasises the need for a grassroots movement, is – hallelujah – in favour of electoral reform, and as her vote in the Deputy Leadership contest proved, is popular among the membership: just not as much as one individual. The man at the centre of the Mensch Thesis, Tom Watson.

Few individuals have brought down one Labour leader, let alone two. Even fewer have gone on to inherit the crown themselves. But equally: few have held as much power within the Labour Party as Watson now does. Massively popular among the membership thanks to his brilliant campaigning on the Westminster paedophile ring, questioning of the Murdochs, and ousting of Blair, Labour’s fixer commands respect across the political spectrum; and to judge by his comments during the Deputy Leadership contest, has at least modified his machine-like ways of the past.

He is also a personal friend of Louise Mensch, Twitter Tory attack dog-in-chief. Mensch is frequently a hate figure for the left (even, on occasion, a joke figure); but this is to seriously underestimate her very real qualities of political cunning and nous. She’s an increasingly shrewd observer of the Westminster scene.

On August 9, Mensch explained how Watson could very quickly replace Corbyn as leader: even as early as Christmas. On Tuesday, she went much further: noting that trade union leaders were already subtly distancing themselves from Corbyn after his disastrous first few days in the job; and reminding us that Watson, not the new leader, is the man who actually has most of them in his pocket.

On Thursday, Bush characterised Watson as on the party’s ‘soft right’. I think that’s a mistake. Just as Creasy is sometimes strangely referred to as a Blairite (she’s not; she’s a non-dogmatic, labels-rejecting, all-inclusive Labourite), Watson is sometimes oddly seen as on the right of the party. In fact, he’s a reformed Brownite, parked right in the centre not only of the Parliamentary Labour Party, but the membership too. The unions’ man; the PLP’s man; the membership’s man. He could not be more strongly positioned.

And that he’s arguably the only figure capable of bridging the yawning chasm separating much of the bewildered, blindsided PLP from the now massively leftist membership is of critical importance. Whenever Corbyn goes (even if it’s genuinely of his own volition, or follows electoral meltdown next year or in 2017), many members will be furious and out for blood. Meanwhile, David Cameron’s reforms to trade union funding – a naked attempt to destroy the Labour Party, as Hodges has set out – mean Labour literally cannot afford to lose those members. It needs them, and many more of them. The only way it can survive, change and ultimately prosper is by broadening its reach across the British left, and eventually uniting it. Corbyn’s victory was merely the first step in that long, hugely overdue process.

How can Labour avoid civil war among the membership and make itself electorally credible again? Just as the Tories did with Howard: by crowning Watson a year or (more likely) two from now, without a contest. Watson already has a mandate; as Corbyn’s Deputy, it’s natural he should succeed. Then, just as Howard didn’t change much of Iain Duncan Smith’s message – he merely tweaked it at the edges, while communicating it infinitely more effectively – Watson wouldn’t need to change all that much of Corbyn’s message either. Somewhere to the right of Corbyn and the left of Miliband – a very distinctive message, voiced in a credible way by a competent, strong leader – is what would result.

Could a Watson-led Labour win in 2020? No, especially given the boundary changes and gerrymandering which the Tories will push through. But he can emulate Howard in overseeing the start of the recovery, going down to reasonable defeat, and handing over to a younger, longer term figure afterwards: either Creasy or Dan Jarvis, in all likelihood.

Of course, a great deal can change in two years in politics. Britain might well be mired in recession by 2017; new figures may have emerged in the party. But right now, it is incredibly difficult to see who other than Watson can replace Corbyn and keep Labour together. Everything points to him; and Blairites most certainly need not apply. Louise Mensch 1, Keiran Pedley 0.

First, a prediction. There is no chance – absolutely no chance on Earth – that Jeremy Corbyn will be Labour leader at the 2020 General Election. Why am I so certain? Read on and you’ll find out.

Corbyn’s rise from nowhere has left the political commentariat even more flummoxed than in May, when almost none of the pundits (emphasis on almost) saw Ed Miliband’s meltdown coming. Shambling around, searching for simple answers to explain something which, in fact, is extremely complex. “Labour have made a terrible mistake!” they cry; but Labour lost control of events a long time ago now. Much more powerful centrifugal forces are at work here.

These have already been seen in action across Europe, notably in Greece, Spain and Scotland; and even, through the guise of Bernie Sanders and, in a completely different way, Donald Trump, in the US. It’s true that Britain isn’t trapped in an economic maelstrom like that in Greece; it’s also true that in practice, the SNP are an awful lot less left wing than they like to claim. But take a look at the new intake of SNP MPs: so many of them seem like ordinary, authentic representatives of their people. Too many Labour MPs haven’t for far too long now.

But here’s the thing: that isn’t their fault. Other than the not unimportant point that they had 13 years to change it, but didn’t, it’s not Labour’s fault that Britain has an absurd, grotesque electoral system which distorts not only the result, but all aspects of political discourse and public policy at all times. Meaning instead of representing who they are supposed to represent, Labour find themselves continually trapped into chasing swing voters who aren’t in the median of the electorate. They’re on the centre-right or further right of it; but their votes count. Those of very many millions do not.

That’s why, during the General Election campaign, Miliband was trapped into repeating those same meaningless, hollow, insipid slogans. “Working people”. “A better plan for Britain”. Or as David Axelrod derisively put it, “vote Labour and win a microwave”. “Our politicians don’t stand for anything any more”, despair so many – and especially in the case of the left, they’re right. The voting system forces them not to.

But because they don’t, millions of Labour voters have been shed since 1997 – and this year, they either didn’t vote, or went SNP, UKIP, Green or Lib Dem. Yes, the Tories only won a majority of 12 – but Labour awoke the morning after the election hemmed in and paralysed as never before, not having the foggiest idea where to turn. Quite literally: hollowed out. And during the leadership contest, boy oh boy did it show.

Anyone who watched Miliband behaving like a rabbit in the headlights a few months back must have assumed a whole number of alternatives on the front bench would’ve done better. But no, they would not. Exactly the same empty platitudes were offered up throughout the contest by Liz Kendall, the tactic without a strategy; Andy Burnham, who flipflopped so often that, having accepted a place in Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet on Sunday, I half expect him to have resigned from the Shadow Cabinet by next Sunday; and Yvette Cooper. The woman whom, in normal circumstances, would surely have won; had far and away the best chance of challenging the Tories in 2020… but when push came to shove, didn’t wake up until it was far, far too late.

Cooper showed real leadership over the refugee crisis, and palpably shifted national debate – but the contest was long since over by then. It was decided by two things: (1) Miliband’s parting legacy of opening the whole thing up (backed at the time by of all people, Tony Blair); (2) the Welfare Reform Bill on 20 July. When to traditional, core supporters, Labour appeared to sell out as never before.

Yes, it’s true that the abstentions happened in order to back a reasoned amendment. But the intricacies of Westminster are nothing when set against appalling, shambolic, rank bad politics. The SNP long ago understood the need to be seen as on the side of the most vulnerable, even if this isn’t always the case in practice; gesture and identity politics are part of successful politics. So, much more to the point, is standing up for what you believe in and foursquare against those who threaten it.

Had Labour not long since lost sight of what it stood for, it is inconceivable that such an epic blunder could’ve been made. The Tories weren’t just mounting a huge attack on social security; they were even about to impoverish millions in work. Frank Field’s brilliant analysis the following morning set it out in stark terms; so did the Institute for Fiscal Studies. But forced by First Past The Post (FPTP) to focus on the 24% of the electorate who voted Conservative, not the 76% who did not, Harriet Harman wasn’t for turning – and critically, neither were three of the four contenders.

The only one who did stand up for what they believed? Corbyn. He’s not spent a political lifetime obsessing with swing voters or focus groups; from the backbenches, he’s been free to be himself, often incorrigibly so. And in this contest, being himself was the surest route to victory – because for the first time since 1994, someone was standing up and shouting traditional Labour values from the rooftops. Right when they most urgently needed to be expressed too.

I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to conclude that most of those pundits or politicians who’ve sneered at Corbyn’s supporters or his victory haven’t been affected by austerity. Do they know what it’s like to be forced out of their home because of the bedroom tax? Do they know anyone sanctioned and left without any means of support for weeks, months or longer, because of either bureaucratic incompetence or (many of us suspect) wanton cruelty? Can they imagine what it’s like to have to choose between heating their home and feeding their children? Are they aware of the horrific impact of cuts on social care up and down the land? Heck: have they even been researching the shocking numbers of deaths within weeks of those found ‘fit for work’ by the DWP?

Austerity isn’t some medicine to be swallowed with a few mild side-effects. Austerity kills. Specifically: it kills the poorest. Those least able to protect themselves. If the Labour Party isn’t there to help, support and protect them, what is it there for? But again: trapped by that wretched voting system, affluent, suburban homeowners are far more electorally significant than single mothers from broken homes; the mentally ill, losing their benefits in their hundreds of thousands every year; or even the disabled. No more than 100,000 swing voters count in an electorate of 46.4m.

Hence Labour’s bizarre acceptance of the urgent need for deficit reduction despite this being opposed by Nobel Prize-winning economists, most macro-economists, and even (to an extent), the IMF. During the leadership contest, Burnham stated that Labour had “spent too much” while in office; but no, it had not. The public being so flat out wrong about something so important is no reason to accept the falsehood. With George Osborne, the Chancellor who doubled the national debt, now doubling down hard on the very thing which caused the debt to skyrocket in the first place, austerity increasingly resembles a corpse which, upon awakening, immediately begins re-administering the poison. Yet all Burnham and Kendall, in particular, appeared to offer was mostly more of the same. More of the same to those already most severely affected.

After the General Election, John Curtice, doyen of British psephologists, highlighted that not only would Scotland be a hopeless cause for Labour if it did not move leftwards; but interestingly, a clear public desire for a compelling alternative economic narrative. While Kendall took this to mean “we must reassure the public over our economic competence”, Corbyn, rightly, was emboldened. At a time of 40% cuts to Whitehall budgets; ‘welfare’ being deliberately turned into a dirty word, with vulnerable recipients scared off even trying to claim it; and the worst, slowest recovery in 300 years (the third worst in 650 years, topped only by the South Sea Bubble and the Black Death), if this doesn’t call for a compelling alternative, what on Earth would?

But there’s something else at work here too. That is: to increasing numbers (especially amongst the poor and squeezed middle), the failure of neoliberalism itself. Some reading will hoot at this; but that failure hasn’t touched the wealthiest or, in most cases, the upper middle. Until 2008, there was always a sense that democracy and capitalism went hand in hand in delivering, if not a land of milk and honey, at least progress: each generation doing that bit better than the last.

Not any more. Now, for the first time since the war, twenty- and thirty-somethings will do worse than their parents; and the prognosis for those younger is even worse than that. Overwhelmed with student debt which 75% won’t pay off at any point (wrecking the argument that most will benefit from university education at all), today’s young find themselves treated as second-class employees until 25; forced to pay absurd rents, with little or no hope of ever saving up for a deposit in Britain’s ludicrously overheated housing market: meaning no future financial security either.

The government, meanwhile, openly pits the young against the old: the latter receive early access to pension pots, have those pensions tied to wage rises (meaning Osborne’s National Living Wage-that-isn’t is, in fact, yet another bribe of his core, elderly vote); as well as benefiting from free bus passes, winter fuel allowances, free TV licenses now subsidised by the BBC… not to mention a one-off property boom which will never be repeated. Osborne’s inheritance tax giveaway means if you’re born into property wealth in the UK, you’ll probably do fine; if you’re not, you probably won’t. Social mobility has been static for decades; very soon, it will go into reverse.

The demographic timebomb being stored up – in 30 years’ time, how will a whole generation who don’t own their homes even survive? How will the country pay for them? – is terrifying. But again, the only individual who put forward a real plan to deal with this? Corbyn. He tapped into huge amounts of support from young people who simply don’t count enough under FPTP for successive governments of both hues to have cared about; he inspired them, in a way no political figure south of Hadrian’s Wall has in a generation. Purely by telling a story they can relate to; but which hardly surprisingly, ageing members of the Westminster Twitterati, unaffected by the burdens I’ve highlighted, plainly cannot.

More broadly, the sense that, since 2008, Western capitalism has mutated into a rich-get-richer-sod-everyone-else scam has wreaked havoc upon social democratic parties across Europe. Most of which were in power at the time of the crash; many of which had embraced free market economics and moved away from their core support in the decade or so beforehand; none of which have come up with any serious response since. In the absence of any viable alternative to capitalism, the best they can do is say “the system’s terrible. Vote for us, and… er… we’ll make it slightly less terrible” – but that’s no platform at all. Hence the pressure they now face from radical, populist parties such as Syriza, Podemos or (in their own way, but certainly how they’ve tapped into the hopes and dreams of young people), the SNP.

In Britain, the clash between a Labour Party light years removed from core principles it was once renowned for (brought into focus more than anything else by the Iraq War) and an economic system which is failing more and more, especially the young, was bound to lead to tumult before long. FPTP strangles even the possibility of new parties, and leads to palpable absurdities like Corbyn and Kendall – or for that matter, Ken Clarke and Bill Cash – standing on the same manifesto; but if the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain. Meaning the long overdue fusion of the UK’s traditional party of the left with precisely those populist forces which are driving politics further afield.

In light of this, it is bizarre that Corbyn has not proposed the kind of anti-Tory electoral pact focused on bringing in proportional representation which Caroline Lucas, Graham Allen or, come to think of it, yours truly called for back in May. Corbyn’s policies are so left wing, they demand such an approach; yet perhaps the bearded old boob is just too tribal, too set in his ways to see that.

Regardless, what we once knew as the Labour Party died on Saturday. During her impressive Deputy Leadership campaign, Stella Creasy, a genuine rising star, continually reiterated that Labour “had to become a movement again” – but a grassroots movement cannot be a grassroots movement if it stands for nothing worth standing for. Above all at a time when David Cameron is taking an electric chainsaw to Labour’s critical trade union funding. For it to survive, let alone prosper, Labour needs these new members, and many more besides – but to keep them, a return to the top-down triangulation of the past just isn’t an option. It has to build towards the long term and a genuinely new, bottom-up politics of the left instead.

Corbyn, then, has been an answer to something; but here’s where it immediately gets awfully messy. All those qualities of just being himself served him beautifully during the campaign, but less than a week into his leadership, are already fast turning into a total liability. This is a man who has never run anything in his life; would never have dreamt of even making it to the frontbench, let alone becoming Leader of the Opposition; whose entire approach to politics is that of protest; has kept some extraordinarily dubious company in his time; and who not only wasn’t supposed to have won, but at many stages during his campaign, bore all the hallmarks of not even wanting the job. His role was supposed to involve merely opening up the debate; at the time he scraped onto the ballot thanks to the charity of a few MPs, nobody anywhere foresaw he could actually carry the day. Including – and this is critical – himself.

Thus his first few days in the position have involved one fiasco after another. A shouty, passive aggressive, garbled victory speech in which he attacked the press: the very entity which any viable political party desperately needs, if not to support it, at least to faithfully report its message. A Shadow Cabinet reshuffle in which a man whose triumph was hailed by the motley trio of Hamas, Sinn Fein and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner promoted John McDonnell, the only man in the entire Parliamentary Labour Party almost as rebellious as Corbyn himself, who once declared “the peace we have now is due to the action of the IRA”, and that he wanted to go back in time and assassinate Margaret Thatcher, all the way to Shadow Chancellor; and in which Angela Eagle’s late night promotion to Shadow First Secretary of State occurred not through any prior planning, but as a panicked response to outrage on Twitter at the lack of women in senior positions.

Corbyn’s failure to sing the national anthem at a service marking the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain was scarcely a crime – but unheard of from someone who supposedly wants to become Prime Minister. And when asked late on Sunday night to comment on his reshuffle by a few journalists, he all but ran away like a startled hare.

No doubt, his supporters will bemoan my focus on apparent trivialities. Goodness knows, the British media obsess with such things at the expense of real issues – but any political leader worth the name has to work with it. Not give it every excuse in the book to focus on his many, to put it politely, idiosyncrasies. Sanders will have no chance of making it to the White House without huge amounts of good publicity; the SNP would be in nowhere near such a powerful position now without the support of the Murdoch press. The Fourth Estate are a vital part of the democratic process; frequently, a decisive one. Without it, the message cannot be communicated.

Not only that – but if he puts his principles ahead of anything else, Corbyn utterly betrays those the Labour Party are supposed to stand for. Tax credits were slashed on Tuesday; but you wouldn’t know it from Wednesday’s front pages. That’s not the media’s fault. It’s Corbyn’s: for behaving with the least savvy I’ve ever seen in any modern day democratically elected leader. Not for nothing have I had ‘Springtime for Hitler’ from The Producers ringing in my ears in recent days.

The reason why Corbyn’s election was potentially so important was it offered the chance, at last, to redraw the boundaries of the political narrative. To focus on the pernicious impact of this government on those with least; to provide a real, credible alternative on austerity and social security. To provide genuine hope to those long since abandoned by a political process which simply does not reflect the views and needs of very, very many.

To do this, he had to moderate his behaviour. Frankly, to shut up about his many ridiculous foreign policy views and focus entirely on domestic issues. Austerity, austerity, austerity. Message discipline was and is the order of the day; in their focus on the apparent ‘threat’ he poses to British security, it certainly is for the Tories.

If Corbyn continues to fall far, far below the challenge, rather than rise to it, the awful danger is he poisons the entire message: that he’s seen not as a breath of fresh air, but the very embodiment of the loony left; that this makes it impossible for any successor to adopt an anti-austerity stance, because it will be ruinously associated with him; and that he’d either close off any potential meeting of minds with moderate voters by remaining, or his quick removal precipitates out-and-out civil war in the newly expanded Labour movement. With consequences which could be life-threatening in nature.

Why, then, is this happening? Why have his first few days been such a shambles? The answer is simple: he’s petrified. In metaphorical terms, soiling himself. Corbyn knows he’s been promoted far beyond his station; he knows that controlled, disciplined leadership is not and has never been his thing; he knows most of his colleagues have no faith in him. Hence his abortive suggestion of giving some of them a chance at Prime Minister’s Questions (because he knows he won’t be much good at it: as Wednesday’s no score bore draw, Corbyn putting eleven men behind the ball for the whole contest, confirmed); hence his promotion of his closest long time ally, McDonnell, too.

Why did he run away from the press on Sunday night, shun the Today programme the following morning, and Andrew Marr on Sunday morning? He’s terrified of what the mainstream media will do to him. Ditto his speech on Saturday: fear makes people (especially shy, diffident, sensitive people) lash out. Corbyn has spent his entire political life in an echo chamber; he’s never had to reach out to the unpersuaded or definitively hostile, and as this would require him compromising on many cherished principles, he knows he won’t be up to it.

That’s why he won’t be around in 2020. He’ll either have been put out of his misery by the PLP or fallen on his sword long before that. Let’s consider three scenarios:

So chastened is he by such a calamitous start to a job he never really wanted that he resigns quickly (ie. by Christmas), modestly and with good grace. Chances: moderate, but stronger than many might assume.

Against all expectations, all logic, he somehow recovers, even does well, but having changed the party, hands over to a younger successor (Corbyn is already 66 now) by the end of 2018. Chances: between slim and none.

He clings on, is allowed to fight next year’s elections and possibly those in 2017 too, but either jumps or is pushed by the time of that year’s party conference at the latest. Chances: strong.

For Labour, however – and here’s where many commentators still don’t get it – it isn’t solely about Corbyn at all. For the party to survive and ultimately revive as part of a broader movement, the key is to ever-so-quietly, entirely from behind the scenes, carefully ensure the succession. Specifically: that whenever Corbyn departs, the views of a massively enlarged membership are heeded, the most important elements of his message sustained, and the party is not done massive, existential harm by a selectorate enraged at the departure of their hero.

The only possible means of achieving this is by coalescing around someone whom the members approve of; who isn’t seen as a Blairite ‘sell-out’, but one of them. That man is the new Deputy Leader, Tom Watson.

Watson, of course, famously played his part in getting rid of Labour’s most successful leader ever. Quietly knifing Corbyn will be a doddle in comparison. On her blog, Watson’s friend, Louise Mensch, has set out both how he can do this, and even that the wheels could already be in motion. Mensch is a hate figure for much of the left, and freely admits her role as a Tory attack dog; but she’s a mightily shrewd political analyst with connections in all the right places.

Quite correctly, she’s noted how the unions – who aren’t in Corbyn’s pocket, but are certainly in Watson’s – are either subtly or not so subtly already distancing themselves from him; she also highlights how he would be seen as authentic in a way alternative successors would not. Watson’s task is to keep the PLP in check, appear as loyal and clubbable as possible, but ensure his forces are ready to strike when the moment comes. And when it does, he’ll be doing both the party he loves and causes it believes in an enormous favour.

I don’t, needless to add, write this with any malice intended towards Jeremy Corbyn at all. I actually feel rather sorry for him. But inspiring pity in others is no quality worthy of any leader; and if he’s left to lurch from disaster to apocalypse, those who’ll suffer most will be those whose Labour’s duty it is to protect. There’s no room for sentiment in politics; not when thousands live or die depending on who the government of the day is.

There has never been a more important time for a real, distinctive alternative to be offered to the British people. Labour’s future – financial and philosophical – depends upon it. There has never been someone less suited to communicating that alternative. Labour’s future – electoral and philosophical – depends on remedying the second point as soon as is feasible.

For the best part of the last 30 years, support for the European Union (EU) and Britain’s role within it has been a badge of honour for the left. Just why is this?

Time was when – until around the mid-1980s or so – much of the British left favoured withdrawal from the then European Economic Community (EEC), while the Conservative Party was split. So much so that pro-European Tory MPs and ministers, infuriated by Margaret Thatcher’s mounting antipathy towards the European project, brought the Iron Lady down in 1990, for reasons which now appear bizarre. After her fall, the whole issue of Europe would poison the party, root to tip; while the highly Europhile New Labour grasped the political nettle. Even entry into the euro seemed likely at one point.

Yet the British left’s quarter-century-long enthusiastic support for all things Europe is at odds not only with UK public opinion, but increasingly, the facts on the ground. The euro experiment has been a political, economic and social disaster: impoverishing huge swathes of southern Europe, tying it to a currency with no escape, and even robbing member states of anything resembling democracy or control of their own destinies. Freedom of movement, the dream of so many pro-Europeans, is imploding in tandem with the Schengen agreement. EU political institutions not only profoundly lack democratic legitimacy, but are inert, helpless, in the face of the greatest refugee crisis since 1945. National governments cannot agree on what day of the week it is, let alone how to collectively respond; anti-immigration sentiment is rising across much of the continent. Is the very thing which was designed to bring help bring peace and stability to a region so often ravaged by war now unwittingly serving to provoke not unity, but mounting anger and division?

By the end of 2017, perhaps as soon as next year, the British people, denied a voice on their country’s role within the EU for over four decades, will go to the polls to decide whether the UK should remain… or leave. This article challenges my fellow travellers on the left to do what they have so often neglected: to scrutinise the EU’s very many failings, think long and hard, and ask yourselves: is staying in really worth it?

The forerunner to the Common Market, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), was the brainchild of extraordinarily enlightened French and West German ministers. Twice in the preceding 36 years, their countries had done one another untold levels of human suffering; and Europe’s longer history had involved constant cycles of violence and misery. The peace we all take for granted now was a dream to statesmen such as Robert Schuman of France and Konrad Adenauer of West Germany: both of whom displayed immense courage and remarkably far-sighted vision. Countries which trade with one another do not fight each other. The European project, based on supranationalism and interdependence, was born.

Yet given how recently the two countries had been at war, and the natural mistrust of both their peoples, what would have happened had the ECSC, founded in Paris in 1951 (where Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands joined France and West Germany as co-signatories), been put to a democratic vote? And where Europe was concerned, lack of demonstrable popular consent would prove a constant and ever-mounting problem.

Monnet and Adenauer

Jean Monnet, founding father of the ECSC, has often wrongly had the following apocryphal words attributed to him:

Europe’s nations should be guided towards the super-state without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.

In fact, these weren’t Monnet’s words at all – but those of the Conservative politician and author, Adrian Hilton, in The Principality and Power of Europe, published in 1997. Yet this is almost by the by. That so many have ascribed the words to Monnet is because so many have been so shocked at what the European project has since become.

The ECSC morphed first into the Common Market, then the EEC. Britain joined in 1973, and its public approved membership by two to one in the 1975 referendum: where recently elected Tory leader, Mrs Thatcher, campaigned passionately for a ‘Yes’ vote. But what the public were sold then – a mutually beneficial club based on free trade and nothing more – was not remotely what would transpire; and gradually, the penny began to drop.

Contrary to her reputation of fire and brimstone (and especially, the myths she indulged following her downfall), Thatcher went on to sign the Single European Act: the first substantive revision of the Treaty of Rome since 1957, which codified not only economic, but political co-operation between member states. With the sole exception of the Lisbon Treaty, no single piece of legislation did more to accelerate the EEC’s transformation from free trade zone to political behemoth.

Under pressure from various key Cabinet ministers – Nigel Lawson, Sir Geoffrey Howe, Douglas Hurd and John Major – and greatly against her better judgement, Thatcher even acceded to Britain’s membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM): where sterling would shadow the deutschmark, but as events would prove, at entirely the wrong rate. But when it came to proposals for a single currency, the Prime Minister balked.

In the House of Commons, Thatcher focused on the obvious threat which a common currency would pose to national, economic and Parliamentary sovereignty. Yet with stunning levels of prophecy, her autobiography, paraphrased by The Telegraph in 2010, set out her broader fears:

(Thatcher) warned John Major, her euro-friendly chancellor of the exchequer, that the single currency could not accommodate both industrial powerhouses such as Germany and smaller countries such as Greece. Germany, forecast Thatcher, would be phobic about inflation, while the euro would prove fatal to the poorer countries because it would “devastate their inefficient economies”.

To watch the famous “No! No! No!” debate in the Commons in October 1990 is to observe two things. First, a Prime Minister in absolute command of the issues: who foresaw with impeccable prescience that no country which loses control of its money supply can retain control over financial policy, Parliamentary sovereignty, or even its democracy itself. And second: support which came more across the floor from figures such as Tony Benn or David Owen than her own party; especially, her own Cabinet.

Thatcher’s increasingly autocratic style – going over the head of Sir Geoffrey, the Deputy Prime Minister, and ignoring collective Cabinet government in so doing – would bring her down within weeks. Yet her words have echoed down the years since. The Iron Lady got many things wrong in her final years in office and divided the country hugely throughout her premiership; but on Europe, who now could possibly claim she did not foresee with perfect clarity exactly what was coming?

The President of the Commission, Mr. Delors, said at a press conference the other day that he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the Community, he wanted the Commission to be the Executive and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the Senate. No. No. No.

History carries with it many strange, bitter ironies. Precisely because Thatcher had become so enormously unpopular by the end of her time, and also thanks to the fratricidal nature of her removal, instead of these words being heeded, two things began to happen. Under her successor, Major, the Conservative Party, unable to forgive itself for what it had done, descended into poison and acrimony: with the amiable Prime Minister undermined at every turn by Eurosceptic backbenchers, egged on by an embittered ex-Premier. The suddenly renascent Labour Party, meanwhile, defined itself against the hopelessly split Tories: the more the latter obsessed with Europe, the more Tony Blair guided his unified troops towards embracing Britain’s destiny at the heart of the European project.

To look back at that time – and, indeed, the years after Blair entered Downing Street – is to cringe at how many on the left assumed Tory Euroscepticism was based on narrow-minded xenophobia or fear of the other. However unelectable the Tories undoubtedly were, or obsessed with Europe they had plainly become, this meant that the detail of matters of profound importance – economic, political, social, and above all, democratic – was never properly discussed. The left simply embraced Europe as a fundamentally good thing; it never really stopped to ask itself why.

To be sure, what had now become the EU appeared to offer the kind of social protections which Thatcher had sought to remove; certainly, a spirit of open-minded, outward-looking internationalism chimed in perfectly with the broad church which New Labour had become. Yet even as it basked in public approbation, Blair’s government never sought to explain the benefits of the EU to the British people, nor allow them any say (for example, on the proposed EU Constitution) via a referendum. There was simply no serious attempt by Europhiles to set out the merits of their position. Was this because in practice, there scarcely were any?

During this time, like so many of my friends and contemporaries, I was an EU enthusiast too. Beyond some warm, fuzzy sense of peace on Earth and goodwill to all men – an aspiration of what Europe could be, not what it actually was – and blinkered antipathy to anything the Tories stood for, I never really thought about it in much depth. The Maastricht Treaty was so dense, so impenetrable, so voluminous, it seemed better suited for use as an offensive weapon than a vitally important document; goodness knows, I had little or no knowledge of the intricacies of the European Council, the European Commission, or the European Parliament. Which of these bodies had what powers, I couldn’t have begun to articulate; nor could anyone else I knew either.

All except one individual, that is. Alan Sked, founder of the UK Independence Party, was a highly engaging lecturer on my Master’s course. Each week, he would warn us of the wholly illegitimate superstate which the EU would inevitably become; each week, we’d all sit laughing. As befits trendy leftie students, almost none of us took him seriously; but like Thatcher and many on the right, Sked, a brilliant man, had long foreseen the direction of travel. If you’re reading this Alan, mea culpa. You were right.

Alan Sked

Mind you, there was one detail I’d parrot to anyone who challenged me about my Europhilia. Freedom of movement. The idea that, should I so choose, I could up, leave, live and work in any other member state was marvellous as far as I was concerned: but in implementing this, the EU had begun to sow the seeds of its own downfall.

For there’s a flipside to freedom of movement. Not merely mass immigration but uncontrollable immigration; nations which lose control of their own borders. And in a globalised world, that inevitably means those from poorer member states migrating to wealthier ones.

At the time, to my shame, I thought the mounting complaints surrounding this, especially following EU enlargement in 2004, were barely concealed racism. They were anything but. Migration on such a scale – the largest wave of inward migration ever to hit the British Isles – pushes wages down and local people, especially those living in poorer areas, out of jobs: generating anger, resentment, alienation, atomisation. The political and media narrative in Britain began to change. In line, it should be noted, with much of northern Europe.

Yet as public frustration grew, still the British people were denied any say on anything to do with the EU. And even in places where referenda were held – in France, the Netherlands, or (twice) in Ireland – rejections of the Nice Treaty, European Constitution, or Lisbon Treaty were met with studied indifference on the part of EU leaders. Their project was now such a runaway express train that no mere member state could be allowed to derail it; so the Constitution was turned into the Lisbon Treaty, and when the Irish people – the only national electorate anywhere in the EU to be allowed a vote on the most far-reaching, seismic piece of legislation in its history – vetoed this, they were simply asked to vote again. Democracy? What democracy?

Why was Lisbon so important? In amending and consolidating the Treaties of Rome and Maastricht, it:

Moved the Council of Ministers from requiring unanimous agreement to qualified majority voting in at least 45 areas of policy

Brought in a ‘double majority’ system: which necessitates the support of at least 55% of European Council members, who must also represent at least 65% of EU citizens, in almost all areas of policy

Established a more powerful European Parliament, which would now form part of a bicameral legislature along with the Council of Ministers

Granted a legal personality to the EU, enabling it to agree treaties in its own name

Created a new long term President of the European Council and a High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy

And made the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the EU’s bill of rights, legally binding.

Whether you agree with these changes or not is beside the point. The point is: the peoples of Europe were never given a vote on it. Instead, all this was just pushed through over the European public’s collective head. In the twenty-first century, how can such profound constitutional changes – which impact on all Europeans, whether they realise it or not – be allowed without democratic consent?

In any polity, if leaders or legislators do not accede to their position through the ballot box, this lack of accountability breeds out-of-touch, unanswerable governance about which the public can do nothing. Yet that is the reality of the European Union. The President of the Commission is approved by the Parliament; except this happens unopposed. All Commissioners – who together, comprise the executive of the EU – are nominated by member states.

The President of the European Council – that is to say, the de facto President of Europe, the EU’s principal representative on the global stage – is chosen by the heads of government of the member states. And even the European Parliament, whose members are all directly elected by the public, (1) has overseen constant falling turnout ever since the first elections in 1979 (of below 50% at each of the last four European elections, and a miserable 42.5% in 2014); (2) cannot formally initiate legislation; (3) does not contain a formal opposition.

In terms of genuine democracy, most of the above is unrecognisable. If more and more people believe that powers are shifting away from their hands and national legislatures towards a group of illegitimate, unelected bureaucrats and apparatchiks, that’s probably because they’re right.

One such apparatchik was Herman Van Rompuy, the European Council’s first full-time President. An individual less cut out for the position of global ambassador for Europe, it’s impossible to conceive of; and following his appointment, one man in particular wasn’t about to allow him to forget it.

As the EU’s institutions have steadily fallen into disrepair, and publics across Europe grown more and more infuriated at the acquiescence of their national assemblies and established parties, populists have increasingly flourished. Ugly, lowest common denominator populists, in many cases; but when it comes to Europe, that doesn’t mean they don’t often have a point. So it was that as the sheepish Van Rompuy, who probably isn’t even a household name in his own household, presented himself to the Parliament, UKIP leader Nigel Farage gave it to him with both barrels:

Who are you? I’d never heard of you. Nobody in Europe had ever heard of you. I would like to ask you, President! Who voted for you? And what mechanism do the peoples of Europe have to remove you?

Farage is wrong about most things; his opinions on the refugee crisis, for example, are abhorrent. But like Thatcher, he’s been proven spectacularly correct on the EU again and again and again; and in any case, he’s only gained a position of such influence because of the enormous disconnect between Eurocrats and European voters. Which, in 2008/9, was highlighted in no uncertain terms by Václav Klaus, then President of the Czech Republic.

In December 2008, Klaus met with the leaders of various European Parliamentary groups at Hradcany Castle, overlooking Prague. His country had yet to sign the Lisbon Treaty. You might imagine this would have been a convivial meeting, with full respect shown towards a democratically elected head of state. Quite the reverse.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the European Greens, complained bitterly that the EU flag was not in evidence above the castle, and plonked his own flag down on the table. He then informed the Czech President: “I don’t care about your opinions on the Lisbon Treaty”.

After the appalling Hans-Gert Pöttering, President of the EU Parliament, weighed in on Cohn-Bendit’s behalf, it was the turn of the Irish MEP, Brian Crowley: who fulminated against Klaus’ apparent support of the successful ‘No’ campaign in the recent referendum. When Klaus replied: “The biggest insult to the Irish people is not to accept the result”, Crowley bawled: “You will not tell me what the Irish think. As an Irishman, I know it best.”

If this was bad, it would get worse. Far worse. Two months later, Klaus was invited to speak to the European Parliament as head of a member state. Europe’s MEPs – supposed servants of the people – were clearly very unused to being told anything other than how wonderful and important they all were. Instead of engaging in the standard empty platitudes, Klaus took the opportunity to deliver perhaps the most important speech ever made in the continental legislature:

Are you really convinced that every time you vote, you are deciding something that must be decided here in this hall and not closer to the citizens, ie. in the individual European states?… In a normal parliamentary system, a faction of MPs supports the government and a faction supports the opposition. In the European Parliament, this arrangement is missing. Here, only one single alternative is being promoted and those who dare think differently are labelled as enemies of European integration.

As if to prove Klaus right, jeers and whistles now began to ring out around the chamber. Undeterred, the President continued, reminding his audience of his country’s tragic recent history under Communist rule: “A political system that permitted no alternatives and therefore also no parliamentary opposition… where there is no opposition, there is no freedom. That is why political alternatives must exist”.

At length, Klaus arrived at the coup de grace. In a few softly spoken paragraphs, he not only punctured the pomposity of the delegates as no-one ever had before; he also set out exactly what was wrong with the European Union, and why this fundamental problem could not be resolved:

The relationship between a citizen of a member state and a representative of the Union is not a standard relationship between a voter and a politician, representing him or her. There is also a great distance (not only in a geographical sense) between citizen and Union representatives, which is much greater than it is inside the member countries.

This distance is often described as the democratic deficit; the loss of democratic accountability, the decision-making of the unelected – but selected – ones, the bureaucratisation of decision-making. The proposals… included in the rejected European Constitution or in the not much different Lisbon Treaty would make this defect even worse.

Since there is no European demos – and no European nation – this defect cannot be solved by strengthening the role of the European Parliament either. This would, on the contrary, make the problem worse and lead to an even greater alienation between the citizens of the European countries and Union institutions.

There followed a quite extraordinary spectacle. Unable to bear the laser guided truth missiles raining down upon them from the lectern, 200 MEPs rose to their feet and walked out. In a dispiriting sign of just how impervious the British left had become on the whole question of the EU, many of those doing so were Labour MEPs. As demonstrations of the farce that is European ‘democracy’ go, it will never be bettered.

In his speech, Klaus had set out just how counter-productive the European project had become. Something designed to bring Europe closer together was, in fact, threatening to drive its peoples apart: because without democratic consent, and in the absence of a European nation, how had the public agreed to what was being implemented over their heads, in their name?

It was also increasingly clear that Europe could only be a superstate, or a collection of sovereign states. It could not be both, operating under the same institutional umbrella. The former required Europe-wide consent which had never been asked for, let alone provided; the latter would only lead to paralysis, with the various members unable to agree on common policy and pursuing often wildly diverging national interests.

Leftist supporters of the EU, even when noting many of its deficiencies, often argue that Britain must stay in to pursue and lead calls for reform. But the point is: for the reasons Klaus set out, it is impossible to reform. The democratic deficit has been spoken about with deepening alarm for 20 years and more; not only has nothing been done to change this, but the Union’s institutions have accrued considerably more unaccountable (in many respects, illegitimate) powers over that time. Uncontrolled immigration has continued across the continent; but in the face of an unprecedented refugee crisis and the emergence of right wing populism in Denmark, England, France and elsewhere, Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the Commission, describes freedom of movement as one of the EU’s “greatest achievements”.

Jean-Claude Juncker

And then, of course, there’s the euro. Nowhere has the intransigent, indifferent, fanatical nature of the Union been displayed more openly than over the ongoing economic catastrophe it proudly oversees. As Thatcher noted in her autobiography, tying so many hugely different economies together under one monetary unit was bound to lead to disaster. Yet this was compounded by (1) no public mandate for this in any of those countries; (2) eurozone states, in theory if not, as we shall see, always in practice, keeping control of their budgets and tax affairs; (3) German monetary discipline in the face of appalling repercussions elsewhere; (4) despite all being part of one currency, member states remaining responsible for the debts they accrue.

The latter point has meant that far and away the euro’s strongest member, Germany, has been able to have its cake and eat it: flooding the market with cheap exports, while deliberately holding wages down at home, and building up the largest trade surplus anywhere in the world. That surplus automatically grows simply as a result of prices being artificially low in Germany, artificially high elsewhere. Its own domestic and political priorities have trumped those of many other euro members.

Meanwhile, when others get into difficulty, they don’t have the option of devaluing and recovering. Instead, all they can do is put taxes up again and again (destroying their competitiveness in the process) and cut, cut, cut: with profound social consequences. The result has been youth unemployment across southern Europe of eye-watering levels: a whole generation has been written off just to preserve a currency which nobody with an ounce of economic literacy believes can work.

The euro has been such a disaster that since its launch amid much fanfare and bureaucrat backslapping, Italy has scarcely grown at all: and recently experienced twelve consecutive quarters of contraction. As the Conservative MEP, Daniel Hannan, has noted, even outside the single currency, Britain is now part of the only trade bloc in the world which is actually shrinking: a bloc most of whose members (but not so much the UK) face mounting demographic timebombs too.

Meanwhile, member states trapped inside the euro’s economic prison have found themselves unable (or rather, not permitted) to change course, even if they wanted to. Ireland was told it would have to have its budget approved by the EU and International Monetary Fund (IMF) before it could hold elections. In Italy, euro architect, Mario Monti, appointed as a lifetime senator just three days earlier, was parachuted in to lead an entire government of wholly unelected technocrats in implementing harsh austerity reforms, regardless of what the public wished. And in Greece, the cradle of democracy, events have had to be seen to be believed.

Greece, of course, is the ultimate example of an economy which should never have been part of the euro to begin with; and whose then leaders conspired with Goldman Sachs in cooking the books to gain admission. The moment it was accepted into, in William Hague’s famous words, a “burning building with no exits”, its fate was sealed.

A great deal of nonsense has been spoken about Greece somehow being responsible for the unmitigated economic catastrophe in which it finds itself: how, in the parlance so beloved of austerians, it “maxed out the credit card, then expected others to pay the bill”. In practice, Greece has been the world’s most enduring victim of the 2008 global crash. This was caused, of course, by the toxic sub-prime mortgage bubble bursting; in consequence of which, the private exposure of the banks was piled onto the public across the developed world.

For Greece, already a weak service economy hugely dependent on tourism, the downgrading of national bonds via the corporate sector and credit rating agencies was especially crippling: piling up interest payments to the point where they became a noose around the country’s neck. Greek government 10-year bond yields, generally sailing along at around 5% until 2010, soared to an unthinkable 48.6% by March 2012.

This meant of the so-called European Central Bank (ECB)/IMF ‘bailout’ loans which Greece received, fully three-quarters went towards debt and interest repayments, paying back the IMF, and recapitalising the banks. Just 11% was used for government cash needs. The loans barely went towards stabilising the Greek economy at all; and were accompanied by austerity packages so lunatic, they should have come with a public health warning.

When George Papandreou, the Greek Prime Minister, announced the government’s desire to hold a referendum on the 2011 ‘bailout’, he was forced out, and replaced, as in Italy, by a technocratic, puppet administration. There was no election; and Lucas Papademos, the new Premier, was a former ECB Vice-President. The Greek people had been warned.

Entirely predictably, given skyrocketing repayments and strangulating austerity, the package failed; and in the meantime, Papademos had intensified the mass sell-off of public assets. Pushed almost beyond breaking point, the public had had enough: voting in a government led by radical leftists, Syriza, earlier this year; then rejecting another draconian bail-out via referendum on July 5.

Since the new government’s accession, it had frantically sought a sensible accommodation with the group of euro finance ministers: Any such agreement would self-evidently feature an enormous write-off of debt. But as the maverick Yanis Varoufakis, Don Quixote himself, quickly discovered, the Eurogroup wasn’t interested in helping a stricken member along the path to sustainability and any kind of viable future. Instead, for nakedly political reasons, it wanted its pound of flesh. Papandreou had been punished for insurrection; so too must the new Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras.

The aim, plainly, was to bring Tsipras’ anti-austerity administration down as quickly as possible. The outbreak of democracy in Greece was a threat to be treated with contempt. Varoufakis found himself confronted by the ultimate blockhead: Wolfgang Schäuble, the ultra-conservative German finance minister.

The other side insisted on a ‘comprehensive agreement’, which meant they wanted to talk about everything. My interpretation is that when you want to talk about everything, you don’t want to talk about anything… There were absolutely no (new) positions put forward on anything by them.

(Schäuble was) consistent throughout… His view was, ‘I’m not discussing the programme – this was accepted by the previous (Greek) government and we can’t possibly allow an election to change anything’.

So at that point, I said: ‘Well perhaps we should simply not hold elections anymore for indebted countries’, and there was no answer.

65 years previously, the ECSC had been born amid a spirit of solidarity: nations putting aside their differences and working together for the common good. Through no fault of its own (other than having signed up to the euro, that is), Varoufakis’ country was trapped in the worst depression seen anywhere in the developed world since the 1930s – but the EU was now a purely political project, driven by self-interested nation states. Those governments which had accepted austerity packages – in Portugal, Spain, Ireland or Italy – were horrified at the idea of Greece winning substantial concessions, because it “would obliterate them politically: they would have to answer to their own people why they didn’t negotiate like we were doing”. Greece was cornered from almost all sides.

There was point blank refusal to engage in economic arguments. Point blank. You put forward an argument that you’ve really worked on, to make sure it’s logically coherent, and you’re just faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken. What you say is independent of what they say. You might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem – you’d have got the same reply.

The day after the referendum, Varoufakis resigned, and rode off into the sunset. In his absence, the following weekend, the whole world witnessed just what a grotesque spectacle the EU had become. Far from seeking to accommodate Tsipras, Eurozone leaders and finance ministers simply piled on more and more pressure; and were armed with the ECB’s threat of unlawfully cutting off liquidity to Greek banks. Even the central bank was now a political tool to be used by politicians as they saw fit. The Eurogroup – which please note, isn’t even a legal entity – didn’t want a workable solution for Greece. It wanted dominion.

The subsequent ‘agreement’ was even harsher than that rejected at the plebiscite: Varoufakis described it as a “new Versailles Treaty”. The Greek left now began to split; but Tsipras had been shown where the true power lay in Europe, and had no way out. On 22 July, he won a Parliamentary vote clearing the way for Greece to agree talks with its creditors on the horrendous new package; but this was no victory. To this thunderstruck observer, for all the world, it was like watching a national Parliament vote itself out of existence.

Tsipras has since been forced to call early elections: the centre-right recently caught up with Syriza in the polls. The euro may well be about to claim its latest victim; the people of Greece will continue to pay an intolerable price.

During his triumphant Labour leadership campaign, Jeremy Corbyn, hero of the British left, has spoken of “solidarity with Greece”. In practice, what does this actually mean? This summer revealed as never before how few friends Greece has within the EU: Eastern European states and Finland were arguably even more draconian in their stance than Germany. There was no attempt to find a consensus which would genuinely help the ravaged Greek economy recover at all; instead, the can was kicked down the road yet again. ‘Extend and pretend’, not real action, was the response to an enormous economic and social crisis affecting an EU member. Solidarity? What solidarity?

Britain is but one often isolated voice among 28 member states, and not even in the euro (despite which, extraordinarily, the European Commission has been trying to enforce UK deficit reduction ever since 2008. Tory austerity? It comes by express order of Eurocrats, dear readers). Even in the wildly implausible scenario of a Corbyn General Election victory in 2020, what could a government led by him actually do? Nothing. Proponents of the EU argue that this is temporary: that the right is currently dominant across much of Europe, and the Union will inevitably rediscover its ‘old values’ when the left reasserts itself electorally.

But this doesn’t stand up. Actually, the only way the euro will stand any chance in future is if a superstate is formally agreed and approved of at the ballot box by its members; and this superstate, in the manner of the federal US, then takes on responsibility for all economic and taxation policy, as well as all debts accrued. The chances of this? Zero. The Eurozone publics and many of its governments would never stand for it.

The great mistake of the EU’s architects has been to assume that, in a world of ever-closer interdependence, nation states could gradually be swept away in the name of a greater cause. In fact, as this important article explains, Europe’s elites knew that disaster was inevitable even before the euro was launched:

Specific crises of national sovereignty were needed, i.e., socially perceived problems that could not be solved within the national framework. The occurrence of such crises was a window of opportunity for the progress of the unification process, and determined its direction: an economic crisis would favour developments towards economic integration… Crises were opportunities for the development of a federalist “initiative”.

‘An economic crisis would favour developments towards economic integration’. In other words, the woes which would befall the euro’s southern states would, or so the Eurocrats believed, inevitably force those states into a federal superstate, whether the people liked it or not.

Ironically, this is essentially the same error as another enormous, unwieldy Union – the Soviet Union – made. Both nationalism and especially its benign cousin, patriotism, will always be innate and powerful forces; people will always need a place called home. And when those people have the right to formulate their own policies and forge their own national destinies at the ballot box removed from them, they react. It’s inevitable. “Europe’s nations should be guided towards the super-state without their people understanding what is happening” – but more and more people do understand what is happening, and they don’t like it one bit.

Thus in the face of the worst humanitarian crisis since the Second World War, the response of a good number of Eastern European states – notably Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic – has been one of fear. It’s true that leaders such as the appalling Viktor Orbán, Hungarian Prime Minister, have irresponsibly whipped this fear up; but it’s also the case that peoples across Europe simply did not vote for migration of whatever nature on this enormous scale.

Meanwhile, what can other governments do but respond to these fears? The Danish government have taken to placing advertisements in the Lebanese press warning refugees of the hurdles they will face should they come to Denmark. The French government have to keep at times alarming levels of support for Marine Le Pen’s National Front in check ahead of Presidential elections in 2017: where she has become a genuine threat. The British authorities unconscionably deport 18-year-old Afghan refugees taken in as children back to their country of origin – an approach which is not only disgracefully inhumane, but as with its treatment of non-EU graduates, constitutes economic self-harm – and have not fully clarified whether the same might apply to the pitifully low numbers of Syrian children being granted asylum now.

In the fractious Europe of 2015, Marine Le Pen is on the rise

Goodness knows what Monnet, Schuman or Adenauer would have made of Europe’s shambolic response (or rather, non-response) to this crisis; but a great deal of it is predicated upon the forces which the European project has unwittingly unleashed. Imagine if, instead of freedom of movement, the nations of Europe still had control over their borders, and could decide which migrants to accept based on the interests of their economies? Would fears about being ‘overwhelmed’ by immigration be anything like as powerful? It’s more likely, surely, that with national, points-based, needs-based systems keeping economic migration under control, European public opinion would be reassured, and refugees from a war as brutal as Syria welcomed with open arms.

In any case: with the Syrian conflict having gone on for over 4 years, killed well over 200,000, and displaced fully half of the entire population, what is the point of the EU if throughout that time, it’s never been able to provide a co-ordinated response? Not only has it taken until now for some member states to begin to agree on the numbers of refugees to be taken in; but there’s never been a common approach in terms of aid, demanding Middle Eastern states do more, or working towards the establishment of safe havens.

As it does not have an army, and is generally less influential diplomatically than a number of member states, the latter two points are largely beyond the EU’s remit: but that again begs the question, what is it there for? What benefits does it bring? What does it presently do which, if it did not exist, Europe’s nations would not already be doing?

A favourite trope of the left is that Britain cannot ‘isolate itself from the world’ or ‘exist by itself’ by withdrawing from the Union. This conjures up the bizarre image of one of the wealthiest nations and largest economies on the planet, arguably number one in terms of soft power, somehow waking up the day after the referendum and finding itself all alone, without a friend anywhere. War, famine and pestilence would, insist the doomsayers, surely follow.

Well, no it wouldn’t. Quite the opposite. The one argument which will be trotted out again and again between now and the referendum is that concerning jobs: so many, we are told, are dependent upon EU membership. It might come as a surprise to learn, then, that Britain is a net loser from the EU in financial terms; and comically, when the UK economy outperforms the rest of the EU, it finds itself penalised for success with a huge surcharge. £1.7bn was demanded by Brussels in October 2014, since quietly paid off.

Is David Cameron in a position to get these rules changed and follow Thatcher, his celebrated predecessor, in securing a rebate? Not in a Union of 28 members with qualified majority voting, he isn’t. Britain might have a voice in the EU; but contrary to the Prime Minister’s protestations ahead of renegotiation, no longer holds remotely enough sway to make a substantial difference to its direction. Angela Merkel, the true power in Europe, has declared that freedom of movement is not up for discussion (Germany’s temporary closure of its borders in recent days is actually within the terms of the Schengen agreement); and when Cameron opposed Juncker’s appointment last year, he found himself in a small minority. Of one.

Meanwhile, as (mostly, though not entirely thanks to the euro disaster) the EU shrinks, so does its share of British exports: which plummeted from 65% in 2006 to 45% by 2014. As the single currency continues to strangle most of Europe’s economies, there is no chance of this trend being reversed: the Greek saga reminding us all of just how bleak the long term prognosis is. Nothing can or will change; southern Europe will remain enslaved by debt, austerity will continue, and eventually, German, Dutch and Finnish taxpayers will face an almighty reckoning. Ageing populations across much of the continent will call welfare models ever more into question too.

Britain doesn’t gain economically from being part of this customs union. It loses. And having vacated its seat at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and been prevented from making any bilateral free trade agreement with any non-EU state since accession in 1973, there isn’t an awful lot it can do about it: unless, that is, it leaves.

Recently, concern has grown over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), being negotiated in secret by the US and EU. The UK has no say here; whatever the EU agrees, it will have to go along with. No-one really knows what the net outcome of TTIP will be – there are strong arguments for and against – but if it allows corporations to sue national governments, the worst case scenario is the effective end of democracy altogether. No wonder, some might say, Eurocrats are so keen.

In any event, just as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) impoverished and ruined Mexican farmers, so TTIP’s most pernicious effects would, just like freedom of movement, inevitably be felt by those least able to absorb them. How can the left even propose, let alone support, such a state of affairs?

There is an alternative though. In an ever more interdependent, digital global economy, freed from the shackles of the EU, Britain would – while still enjoying full access to the single market via membership of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) – be able to make trade agreements with whoever it pleased. It would have the best of both worlds. And as the EU shrinks economically, so the Commonwealth grows. The latter overtook the former in 2013; while the so-called ‘Anglosphere’ of English-speaking countries – the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland – will soon be more populous than mainland Europe. If we included South Africa, Caribbean democracies, Hong Kong, Singapore and (however dubiously), rapidly rising India, much more populous.

Highlighting the potential strength of the Anglosphere no doubt sounds quaint; backward-looking, even. To a time of Empire long since passed, and Churchill’s famous line about the three concentric circles. But that misses the point. Its core members share common legal frameworks, common values, an approach to liberalism which makes co-operation in business, economics and much else besides very simple. There’s a reason why English is the lingua franca of business. Why should the UK look to a union based on geography, rather than common language, and a colossally successful common approach to trade?

And of course, this would only form part of British commercial policy anyway. As Hannan, the most articulate, perceptive, idealistic advocate of UK withdrawal anywhere – whom, it is imperative, should be front and centre of the ‘Out’ campaign – has noted, the argument here shouldn’t be beloved of Little Englanders. It should be that of Big Worlders. It’s a big world out there, in which Britain can play its full part across all spheres: including, of course, Europe.

If the EU really were merely a free trade zone, it wouldn’t be necessary to make these arguments. It’s not. It’s a political leviathan: which conducts commercial agreements by itself, arrogates more and more powers to itself, makes and enforces positively byzantine legislation, and has never sought the consent of the people in the process. If any object, it ignores them; if the consequences include economic meltdown across its southern states, it continues blithely along its oblivious, self-congratulatory path; and in the face of real humanitarian catastrophe on the edge of Europe, its institutions don’t so much glide into gear, as clunk. Almost in slow motion.

The fundamental paradox at its heart – that it acts like a de facto superstate, but is continually paralysed by the differing interests of nation states – can never be resolved without democratic consent across the continent, and has caused its signature ‘achievements’ of the euro and the Schengen agreement to descend into fiasco. It shrinks both economically and commercially; its top down, ever more distant nature provokes mounting disquiet and reactionary populism among peoples who have had the ability to control their own affairs removed.

To those on the left reading this who feel differently, I challenge you: name five tangible benefits of EU membership. Not soft, touchy feely, aspirational benefits; actual, real benefits. This should surely be a slam dunk given the frequently unblinking support provided for the EU – but it’s not. I can’t find a single benefit worth the name. All I can identify is the law of unintended consequences acting in all its might as never before.

Thatcher and the Eurosceptics were right all along. Not only are there no real advantages to Britain remaining, but the EU acts against economic prosperity, social cohesion, democracy and nation states; and step by step, is creating a continent both divided and increasingly fractious. If it had never been created, would anyone seriously now invent it? When the referendum comes, the British people should vote to leave.

Britain. Shortly before 10pm, May 7, 2015. Most within the Labour Party expect that next day, they’ll be forming a minority government; Ed Miliband is even preparing a victory speech. Then one exit poll later, the party’s collective chin hits the deck with a resounding crash. All sorts of certainties had vanished. Vanished, if Labour isn’t careful, for good.

Ever since its defeat (which shocked most, but not all of us), Labour has been like a punch drunk boxer: flailing around helplessly in all directions. Unable to find a coherent narrative under Miliband, it’s been even more unable to properly understand either why it lost, or what to do about it. Why? As long as we accept the tribal confines of British politics, in which the left pits itself against itself, cutting its own throat in the process, there is no simple answer. No clear path back to office exists: not with the tectonic plates the way they are now; not given the ongoing decline of social democratic parties all over Europe; nor when we factor in Labour’s long term neglect of its core voters, grassroots members, activists and structures.

All sorts of narratives quickly emerged to explain the defeat: all of which have some merit, none of which embody the whole picture. None of them could; the answer is too complicated for anyone to perfectly encapsulate. Was Labour trusted on the economy? No, but that doesn’t mean it should move rightwards. Did Labour shed support to the left? Yes, but that doesn’t mean it should return to what it once was. Above all because what it once was (in 2007, let alone 1983) no longer works.

Should Labour listen to its one surviving Prime Minister (and the only one to even win a majority since 1966), Tony Blair? You might think so – but the electoral coalition he put together was essentially short term; dependent entirely on him, a one-off political superstar, leading it; did a huge amount of long term damage to the party; and enjoyed success amid economic conditions and social attitudes which no longer apply, and will probably never do so again.

That the party has been so palpably bewildered and paralysed since its defeat shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s entirely natural. Wherever it looks, whatever direction it might try and move towards, Labour is boxed in as never before. If it moves to the right and tries to become a more palatable version of the Conservatives, not only does it give Scotland (without which, it cannot win) up as a lost cause, but it will shed even more support to the now left-leaning Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the dispiritingly massed ranks of non-voters… and do itself, in my judgement, lethal harm among its hollowed out grassroots. Upon whom it depends to get its message out – but it has to have a worthwhile message with which to mobilise them in the first place.

If it moves to the left in a bid to recapture its core support and sound more authentic, it is unlikely to make much headway in Scotland, where the rise of the Scottish National Party amounts to a fundamental, generational, more than likely irreversible shift, presaging independence in no more than the medium term; and achieve nothing whatsoever in Tory-dominated southern England: without which, it cannot win. Too right wing for Scotland, too left wing for England; but even that barely scratches the surface of the bind it finds itself in.

If Labour does nothing to oppose a socialism for the old, capitalism for the young Britain turned upside down, in which young people – overwhelmed with debt (which most will never pay off) even before entering an ever more insecure job market flooded with graduates, in which they’ve now been formalised as second class citizens until age 25; expected to deal with skyrocketing rents; unable to ever hope of buying a home for love nor money; and if they come from an abusive home and have no support network, are quite likely to find themselves on the streets – it won’t only lose the support of the young, but lose many of them to politics and the democratic process altogether.

But it can’t do anything much about that – and why? Far and away its worst electoral problem is with the grey vote: of whom there’ll be 1.5m more by 2020. Meaning it can’t propose rent caps, or a land value tax, or any sort of pension reform, or remove any of the freebies which so many pensioners enjoy at the same time as hundreds of thousands in work are plunged into poverty – because to do so is electoral suicide. How did the Tories win the critical support of so many pensioners? Both through being much more trusted on the economy, but also the outrageous pre-election bribe of allowing instant access for over-55s to their pension pots. A bribe supported and implemented by the Lib Dems: to their loss and their coalition partners’ gain.

And then, of course, there’s UKIP. Amongst Labour’s many election blunders, its implacable opposition to a referendum on the EU was maybe the worst of all. This didn’t only mean that it didn’t trust the people and thought it knew better; it underscored its horrendous obliviousness to the effect of uncontrolled immigration from the EU into working class areas: pushing down wages and making work ever more insecure. Labour’s attitude towards immigration – sneering at those who raise the issue as “racist”, while being wholly impervious to its drawbacks – has, all too often, resembled that of cossetted, out of touch metropolitan liberals hectoring from an ivory tower. It has to develop a vastly more Euro-sceptic stance, seeking real reform on, above all, freedom of movement, as a matter of increasing urgency.

But if it does that, it runs the risk of losing precisely the middle class, metropolitan liberal support it gained in London – its only election success story – and, indeed, of looking unprincipled; changing its position too much. Everywhere it looks, there’s a problem; what it might gain in terms of votes through any particular shift in policy, it will lose for the same reason.

Against such a backdrop, of course it’s confused. Of course it’s looked a complete shambles. Any other party trapped in such a grim position would too. But that’s not to say it hasn’t made a whole series of blunders which have turned a drama into a mounting (threatening to become existential) crisis: which started when, with the final misstep of his hapless leadership, Miliband stupidly stood down immediately instead of presiding over an orderly, Michael Howard to David Cameron 2005-style transition.

This meant that, for the second Parliament in a row, Labour immediately ceded any control of the narrative to the Tories. Last time it did that, a cacophony of gibberish about it having “caused the crash” – the big lie which won Cameron the election – was allowed to go unchecked. This time, the narrative has shifted to social security (or as Cameron likes to pejoratively term it, ‘welfare’: Tory cynicism summed up in a single word): with Labour accused of being “weak on welfare” if it did not support a whole series of horrific cuts which will plunge hundreds of thousands into poverty (including, staggeringly, many in work); socially cleanse the south of England (given the boundary changes which will follow, a nakedly political move designed to drive any remaining non-Tory support out of more affluent constituencies altogether); remove £30 per week from the disabled and infirm; slash the already derisory amounts provided to asylum seekers and their children; remove access to housing benefit altogether for anyone under 21; and even appear to require women who have a third child as a result of being raped to prove it.

During the last Parliament, the Conservative narrative on the deficit was based, very simply, on the politics of bullshit. The narrative on social security is similar. Housing benefit is what it is because of constant failure to do anything at all about exorbitant rents; and just as alarmingly few voters ever realised that George Osborne, not Labour, had doubled the national debt, so they are also unaware that by far the largest chunk of the ‘welfare’ bill goes not on unemployment benefit, not on benefit fraud… but on pensions. The recipients of which, again for nakedly political reasons, the Tories protect and indulge with various unnecessary freebies at all costs.

So is Labour challenging the narrative? Of course not. Instead, the left watched aghast as Harriet Harman, the disastrously incompetent acting leader, demanded the Parliamentary Labour Party abstain on the Welfare Reform Bill. Together, leadership contenders Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper at least forced Harman to agree to a reasoned amendment – but whatever the whys and wherefores of Parliamentary procedure, the damage was done, and those who accuse Labour of being ‘Red Tories’ or ‘Tory lite’ were greatly emboldened.

Harman – caretaker the last time Labour disastrously lost control of the narrative – had already committed a far, far worse blunder than that, though. In my view, an unforgivable one. On May 18, she threw the entire leadership contest open to anyone prepared to pay just £3 for the privilege. No doubt, this was well intentioned – the idea was clearly to elect a leader with national, not just party appeal – but it was one of the most ludicrous, moronic things I’ve ever seen any political leader do. On Twitter, I described it as “insane”; as far as I was concerned, anyone with half a braincell should have been able to see what would now happen.

This is absolutely insane. > Harriet Harman: voters can pay £3 to help choose next Labour leader http://t.co/B7GFssgnoF

Sure enough, up popped The Telegraph to helpfully implore its readers to fork out three quid, vote for Jeremy Corbyn (the nomination of whom by many who aren’t even supporting him constitutes yet another blunder) and “destroy the Labour Party”. Sure enough, the Sunday Times are reporting today that the contest has been infiltrated by the hard left and very same militant tendency which turned Labour into an unelectable, internecine rabble during the 1980s. Much of which will explain why Corbyn, an unreconstructed Bennite, former Morning Star columnist, who rebelled against a three-line whip no fewer than 238 times during the last Labour government, has swept dramatically ahead in the race, according to the only opinion poll so far conducted.

Of course, there are other reasons for his success. While his rivals compete to sound mainstream and appeal to swing (meaning, because of First Past The Post, centre-right or right wing) voters, Corbyn has simply been himself: espousing positions few of which can be described as extreme in traditional left or even centre-left terms; none of which have the remotest relevance in Britain in 2015 (for reasons I’ll shortly explain). With 76% of the electorate having not voted for the most right wing government seen in Britain since at least the 1930s, a left long since disenfranchised by the iniquities of FPTP suddenly has someone it can believe in: someone different, offering real hope.

We’ve seen the ‘none of the above’ phenomenon in British politics before. It helped sweep Ken Livingstone to the London Mayoralty as an independent in 2000; launched Nick Clegg into national consciousness during the 2010 General Election campaign; and has more than a bit to do with the SNP’s success as well. Corbyn’s success is a comment on just how narrowly unrepresentative politics in Britain have become over the last three decades; just how out of touch and disconnected, so many of its politicians – all suits with nothing to say – now are.

Instead of facing him down with conviction, authority, passion, vision, leadership, his rivals have been cowed. Burnham embarrassing himself during the Welfare Bill fiasco; Liz Kendall, the tactic without a strategy, the Blairite who doesn’t understand the first thing about Blairism, polarising the debate so much with a whole series of harshly expressed right wing platforms that she’s unwittingly pushed many voters towards Corbyn (and certainly made him look less extreme, in Labour terms at least); and Cooper: who has said nothing about well, anything really.

Why has she done that? On top of incomprehensibly continuing to support FPTP, the world’s second worst electoral system, despite it being the very thing which has left it so helplessly squeezed, the very thing which has distorted political debate and public policy so much ever since 1981, the very thing which has led it to neglect its core support and grassroots base for so long that the Corbyn surge has been the inevitable result, Labour also uses the world’s worst electoral system, the Alternative Vote, for its leadership contest. Last time round, AV delivered the wrong brother. This time, its emphasis on second preferences has left Burnham and Cooper frightened of even trying to articulate anything convincing; and the latter very plainly pursuing a strategy based on securing enough second choice votes to win.

Will this work? In normal circumstances, ie. if Harman hadn’t opened the contest up to every man and his dog, it almost certainly would have done; and personally, I very much hope it does. Cooper is the only candidate who can both keep the party together and offer some sort of credible threat to the Tories: she’s competent, capable, strategically smart, and should be effective at the despatch box too. Her ideas on the digital revolution are important; her emphasis on childcare, much needed. For the good of the party and of British politics, she’s the option who needs to win.

Yvette Cooper has the best chance of challenging the Tories

By contrast, Burnham – whose work on Hillsborough was magnificent – would hold Labour together, but merely be a more charismatic version of Miliband. He has little or no appeal in swing constituencies; and contrary to his cliches about getting out of the “Westminster bubble” (memo to Andy: if you have a problem with that bubble, try not to spend your entire career beforehand as a machine politician within it), I doubt he’d change very much about the way the party operates. His conceding the Tory lie about Labour spending is also a serious error, because it leaves him forced to go along with further cuts, or be branded a flip flopper and hypocrite.

Kendall? The trouble with Liz isn’t merely her policies, or a (deliberate?) misreading of the election result based entirely on the economy and ‘aspiration’ when in fact, Labour’s infinitely greater problem was its dreadfully weak leadership and lack of a coherent, simple narrative. It’s her harshness; her coldness even. A couple of days after the election, I watched the MP for Leicester West, who I’d never previously heard of, interviewed on the BBC, and had an immediately visceral reaction: the like of which I can scarcely recall feeling about any Labour politician.

Never mind that strategically, telling a party it’s wrong about more or less everything is, as Michael Portillo would confirm of the 2001 Tory leadership contest, a surefire way of not winning (compare this with Neil Kinnock in 1983 or Blair in 1994, both of whom were all sweetness, light and platitudes before their electors); I knew that neither Labour members nor the broader public would be able to take her at all seriously as a prospective leader. And in that, I appear to have been right.

A Kendall win, inconceivable thankfully, would split the party: haemorrhage support away to the SNP, Lib Dems and Greens, not to mention the activists it desperately needs to take the fight to the Tories on the ground. Her whole campaign has been based around the message that “only she can win”; the reality, I’m afraid, is the exact opposite.

But as her threat recedes, a much larger one grows: Corbyn. Who barely even wants to be leader (in which case Jeremy, you really shouldn’t be standing); and who when asked on Channel 4 News about having once described Hizbollah and Hamas as his friends, exploded in such a rage that it should have disqualified him from contention there and then. That’s not to say he was wrong to complain about the Middle East being trivialised; it’s just that his reaction was akin to an angry, drunk, hectoring left winger getting into an furious argument down the pub. Endearing in some ways: but a disastrous sign of what the media would do to him. And in the parallel universe of him becoming Prime Minister (imagine him at a summit with the Israeli leader!), what he’d do to Britain’s international image too.

But this is almost irrelevant when set against the wider problem of what a Corbyn win would do. There is no chance that the PLP would wear it. This would be worse, a lot worse, than when Iain Duncan Smith became Tory leader thanks to the support of grassroots members who did not have the first clue (or, in many cases, care) of what electability is actually about. Cue, in next to no time, a coup – but if that happens, so many members and activists, hopes swelled by him having won, would simply give up. Labour would have confirmed themselves ‘Red Tories’ once and for all; and the collapse of the party would allow the real Tories to reign unchecked for goodness knows how long, abandoning the most vulnerable to their fate. If this government is what the Tories are capable of with a 12-seat majority, imagine what they’d be like if there’s no opposition at all.

Many will think I’m exaggerating here. I am not. Why would the PLP bring him down? Not because of arrogance; not even because a hollowed out, top down structure which has separated them from activists more and more over the last two decades. They’d bring him down because Jeremy Corbyn’s policies could not be more impracticable in a modern setting.

During the election campaign, when Labour were actually fighting on as progressive a platform as is possible under FPTP, many on the left demanded to know why it wasn’t anti-austerity; why it also pledged deficit reduction, albeit of a more manageable kind. If the SNP could do it, why couldn’t Labour? To which the answer is: (1) As the Institute for Fiscal Studies confirmed, the SNP weren’t anti-austerity either: it just pretended to be, while actually proposing more drawn out austerity than Labour; (2) The SNP is able to sound social democratic as long as it does not have control of Scotland’s finances. The moment it does, the rules of the game change: it would immediately have to become a lot more centrist, or else.

Before its supporters furiously interject, no: I’m not arguing that Scotland is “too wee” or “too poor” to be independent. I’m arguing that an independent Scotland (which to be viable, would require its own currency and control over its own economic policy, as recent events in the eurozone have again confirmed) would immediately face all the same fiscal pressures and constraints as those already impacting on every other European economy, almost none of which (even Germany, prime beneficiaries of the disastrous euro experiment) are growing much. The great lie about an independent Scotland is it could be socialist, or even social democratic. It could not. The great lie about a Corbyn-led Britain is it could be socialist, or even social democratic. It could not.

Many of those on the centre-left who consider themselves anything but extreme are, essentially, upholders of the post-war consensus: founded upon an extraordinary sense of solidarity – everyone really was all in it together – born during the war. That Blitz spirit, everyone doing their bit to help save the country, gave rise to a demand even with the war still ongoing of a new kind of Britain: an end to upstairs/downstairs, a nation truly fit for heroes. Universal education, free healthcare, decent housing, full employment: a dignified life from cradle to grave for all. What, many reading this will wonder, could possibly be ‘extreme’ about any of that?

Across Western Europe, Marshall Aid – the US pumping in massive financial assistance to stop the continent falling to Communism – made this possible, and drew the whole region into a Pax Americana which has only expanded since. But the Bretton Woods system of collective financial management, in which currencies were tied to gold, was what underpinned it; and when this failed in 1971, the US terminating convertibility and the dollar becoming the world’s reserve currency, all that had previously been certain was now anything but.

International currency markets gained dramatically in power; and in Britain, heavy industry became more and more uncompetitive: in economic terms, a complete liability. Thatcherism, Reaganomics, monetarism and neo-liberalism were the result: the US and UK turning into countries which stopped making things, and started importing more and more instead. The US was protected by its reserve currency status; Britain was not. And as it was not – as it became service-based, with an emphasis on the financial sector above all – the welfare state its people had come to take for granted was already on borrowed time.

That welfare state, and with it, a large public sector, meant that public debt began to grow. This wasn’t a major problem as long as the economy kept growing too: and between 1992 (when the UK was freed from the Exchange Rate Mechanism by Black/White Wednesday) and 2008, grow it did: continually. But as that growth was based on a housing bubble and consumer debt, it was never going to last forever; and while Labour was absolutely not responsible for the global crash, it was running a structural deficit.

Now, the shock caused by the crash and especially, the dramatically reduced tax take led the deficit to shoot up: but what happened in 2008 was much more fundamental than that. The world financial system itself failed, and has not truly recovered since: with government bailouts of stricken banks (regarding which, they had no choice) piling colossal amounts of debt onto the public, but amounting to little more than a sticking plaster.

As the coalition came into office and austerity was enacted, Britain went back into recession. Austerity does not work because if you take money out of an economy, it contracts, meaning you still have to borrow just to stand still. So borrow, Osborne did: more in 5 years than Labour had in 13, doubling the national debt in no time. But the problem is that in this greatly changed landscape, Keynesianism and conventional macro-economics don’t work either. In the developed (but importantly, not the developing) world, capitalism itself has effectively failed; and the unspoken secret is that economists on either side of the argument don’t have an answer.

Around the world, the fundamentals remain very unsound. The US is protected by the dollar’s status; but the euro area has barely grown at all over the last decade; Russia is in all sorts of trouble thanks to US and EU economic sanctions; Japan’s two-decade-long deflation may shortly give way to stagflation; China is encountering more and more difficulties; the banks have still not been regulated. The factors precipitating a second global crash are gradually moving into place; and this time, almost all Western economies are massively less insulated, because almost all are running unsustainable deficits. And of those, Britain, with the second largest deficit in the OECD, and again only growing because of services and another property bubble, is in one of the most vulnerable positions.

Borrowing and investing in order to create more sustainable growth, as Keynesians want, is not an option against such a backdrop. Britain’s debt is only manageable as long as interest rates remain so historically low (something which puzzles economists more than maybe anything else). As soon as they rise, as they must at some point, the fur will hit the fan. The only way of avoiding this would be first, a mass Jubilee 2000-style debt write-off; and second, some new version of Bretton Woods. But in a globalised world, with corporations, not nation states, calling the shots, and the developing world (most of which is unencumbered by anything much in the way of a welfare state) growing rapidly and naturally wanting more of a steadily diminishing pie, that’s a lot easier said than done.

Complicating matters still further is what governments find when they put taxes up: as a Corbyn government would do, very substantially. It’s not just that capital flees and a brain drain occurs. It’s that the tax take itself hardly changes. Since 1964, UK income tax rates have ranged from 40%, to 96%, to 50% – yet as a proportion of GDP, tax revenue has remained extraordinarily static: almost always between 34% and 36%. As this article explains, in Britain, the reason is probably cultural: but the forces of globalisation mean it has never been harder for any government to soak the rich in order to significantly redistribute wealth and pay for a substantial welfare state than now. In the terms Corbyn proposes – even those Labour proposed in 1992 – it’s essentially impossible.

And as it’s impossible, the deficit and debt would quickly become utterly uncontrollable: indeed, lethal. This is why left of centre parties across Europe stopped proposing socialism long ago; and since 2008, have even stopped offering social democracy. Tax takes cannot pay for what the left traditionally demands. To take the most benign view (which his policies certainly don’t warrant) of Osborne’s approach, it’s also why he’s slashing spending, but not putting up direct taxation. The alternative would involve the politically impossible move of means testing pensions (albeit, tying pensions to earnings and offering free TV licenses, free bus passes and winter fuel allowances to any pensioner who doesn’t need them is wholly unnecessary, and an electoral bribe).

The unspoken truth of austerity is this. In the developed world, it’s not temporary. It’s permanent. Living standards for almost everyone will fall, and inequality rise towards South American levels: gated communities will probably begin to appear in Europe before much longer. Jobs will become ever more insecure as machines and robots reduce the need for paid human labour; holiday entitlements will disappear, retirement and pension ages will rise to almost unimaginable levels. What we expect of the state at present will be unrecognisable no more than two generations from now as China and India gradually catch up with and ultimately surpass Europe – and with corporations and businesses in competition with others all over the world, it is not possible for European governments to resist this. All they can do is seek to ameliorate it and provide as soft a landing for as many people as possible; the Tories’ wanton failure to even attempt this (and narratives based on lies designed to turn one section of society against another, invariably more vulnerable one) is why I object to their approach so strongly.

Of course, no government will ever spell this out. In Britain, there are occasional coded comments from ministers about “winning the global race” (the code covers the unspoken remainder of the sentence, “to the bottom”) – but to explain it is simply too frightening for public opinion, used to a standard of living which it once assumed would inevitably improve forever, to comprehend. But at least the right is operating from within a capitalist system which suits its individualistic ideology more than ever; throughout Europe, defining what it stands for amid such a bleak context has never been more difficult for the left.

If it admits that in essence, there’s nothing it can do, it commits hara-kiri. But a platform of “vote for us, and we’ll just tweak things around the edges a bit” (Labour’s platform at the 2015 election) is no platform at all. Meaning that as old parties decline, identity politics emerge instead: based on clear, simple, often emotive language, defining itself against something (in Greece and Spain, austerity; in Scotland, Westminster and austerity; in England, France and Denmark, immigration and the EU); and offering the hope that, if only the particular thing being angrily objected to is removed, a new Jerusalem of whatever form can rise instead. But it cannot. Much more powerful economic forces are at work, which no country can resist.

There’s nothing surprising about Corbyn’s massed ranks of supporters wanting to retreat into the past. Neo-liberalism has failed; austerity has failed; social democracy has failed; the world is now vastly more insecure. Where there used to be innate confidence on the part of most that capitalism and democracy worked in harness to lift people up, give them opportunities, help them pursue their dreams, and provide, if not milk and honey, at least a sense of progress, each generation doing that bit better than the last, that feeling has gone now. In the dawning age of post-democracy, capitalism is suddenly working against the people, not for them. There has to be something better, surely?

Well yes, eventually. In the Guardian, Paul Mason, ever the optimist, spelt out its most idealistic form. But even if, which I very much doubt, Mason’s vision is what ultimately results, it won’t be with us for a very, very long time. The transition from the failure of the world financial system to a new, almost unimaginable reality will probably take the rest of this century to complete. What can the left do in the meantime?

On the basis that oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them, any chance Labour has of a remarkable resurgence in 2020 is predicated much more on the clouded economic picture than anything else: albeit, Osborne’s cuts will hit almost all sections of society, and there’s only so much pretence around living wages that are anything but which even the Tories’ sleight of hand, smoke and mirrors will be able to get away with.

Labour must vigorously challenge the government on all aspects on this: focusing, as it’s already starting to do, on the appalling impact on working people above all. It needs a coherent, credible alternative narrative on the economy; Cooper is considerably best placed to provide it. Corbyn (who make no mistake, could certainly win; and if he does, all hell will break loose in all sorts of ways) is no option at all.

But more fundamentally: Labour must not look back to the past, to hopelessly failed methods which could not be more impracticable now, to a Bennite in unwitting danger of splitting (even, in the case of some of his hard left supporters, destroying) the Labour Party just as his mentor did; but forwards. Labour is in crisis because labour itself is no longer organised, but instead, dispersed, even atomised; so it has to re-organise, rebuild its antiquated grassroots structures, re-engage with the public in all local communities in all sorts of innovative ways, and become a continual campaigning movement at local level.

Localism, not centralism; bottom-up, not top-down, are key here; so too, as the Smith Institute put it on Friday, is “re-imagining the state… a hand-up, not a hand down”. Facilitating people, not controlling them; structures which support people from below, not above; harnessing the limitless opportunities provided by technology in very modern ways.

Building open minded progressive alliances which seek to share and devolve power, not control it, above all ahead of general elections, has never been more important either: though if Labour continues to set its face against this, don’t care will inevitably be made to care before much longer. In light of the most disproportionate election result in British history, that none of the leadership candidates, not even Corbyn, have spoken about voting reform in any meaningful way is extraordinary. Securing proportional representation, and achieving this through a specially assembled anti-Tory bloc, could be Labour’s great, radical cause… if only it could see beyond the end of its own nose for a change.

Fortunately, it at least has someone within its ranks who understands the criteria set out above; who hallelujah, does support electoral reform (if not yet PR), and who that man Blair described word for word during his question and answer session at Progress last week. The media, true to form, focused on who he didn’t mean, not on who he did: but she’s a huge part of that future. And it’s to her ideas – to Stella Creasy, a very new kind of politician, with a very new conception of campaigning, organising, mobilising, and what the left should be about – I’ll be turning in my next article.